‘Way off among the cars …’

light on mottled brick, the glow on
timber around doors and windows where there’s
lacquer left to reflect sun

next-door’s lawn-mower / old electric-cord type
with a roller, its burr of sound making you think of
bowling greens, lawns like carpet, sedate pursuits

a pair of rubber boots, black with blue soles and cuffs leaning at
the angle where the wall turns a corner; down that side
if I turn my head will be white quince-blossom, wisteria

all these tug at me, my heart (recovering from flu
inclining to detect harmonies

the clutch of paint tins on the yellow kindy-table
signing a household keen to Keep Itself Nice rather than
one that doesn’t put things away

& Janet Charman’s ‘dad driving …’ /
country Show (NZ)

poem, despite a chill behind the word ‘perfect’
repeated

calls up Easter Weekend races, Mallala
& echoes of Irish Dancing contests, miles
out of town, dad driving,

not
Maryborough, Myponga
Macclesfield? (yes)

– 169 –

us high-stepping, arms by sides,
shuddering platforms
raising dust in summer paddocks

medals still in our mother’s wardrobe drawers

I reach her end-line: ‘where is our brother’

so, as I must, I
pencil him in

—chasing up the hill after our cousins to
our vantage points for the Great Eastern
some horses down every time in the steeplechase

we aren’t always watching

This novel, also —1988—

boys careering towards some Great Excess,
asks

me, us impertinent
about our brother, late / where he is

well, ‘way off among the cars’ (Janet knows)

despite it being true that
six, skinny, gap-toothed, all those
mornings with

(us) his sisters, he ran behind Mr Allen’s
milk-truck, the horizon close as the
Dusty Track turnoff

– 170 –

a white linen suit for marrying in, a white caravan
washed downstream / at this point we can’t help
seeing portents / or reading them, backwards

Irish
instead, ladies

take your place in this commodious square of order
as it may be the front seat of the car on a calm day
humming a reel or a jig
the two big girls, maybe one or two smaller
our pumps black and soft our socks too white to be true

dad
driving

base clay

red clay disgorged by the new post-hole
gives the lie to designer topsoil

baked, dry, crumbly it means
‘home’ or ‘then’, when our world
was young

truckloads of rich thick brown loam
sit on top of it all over the Adelaide plains
—mudpacks

that never soften the base
complexion, Bay-of-Biscay red
left to itself, it grows abundant prickles, three-

– 171 –

corner-jacks, paddy-melons, couch & a straggly
leguminous grass that has little pea-pods we
searched out and ate

on blasted-heath playgrounds that proliferated in
the ‘50s, the kind that had hot-metal maypoles with
rings at the end of dangling chains

circular running-tracks pounded into the dirt around
where kids trotted faster and faster, gathering momentum,
leaving the ground and whirling, arms pulled taut

a stumpy tap by the fence perhaps, no trees, a jungle-gym
death-defying swings & on the ground patches of
those little pea things that tasted dusty, nutty, sweet

the clay supports geraniums, lantana, succulents
stone-fruit trees if you keep the water up to them, but
lawns, even kikuyu, develop worn patches

like mangy dogs, red-brown hide showing through
The slides of Moi’s and Jack’s kids (Moi in a ‘shift’)
have the boys in cadet gear on the lawn

slouch hats and sergeant stripes, gaiters
lined up on the bare bits outside the rumpus room
and in front of the nectarines

sun-whitened palings falling down in the background
Along the walk from our place to theirs, Sturt Creek,
Marion Oval where the kids who were allowed to be

in Marching Girls raised bottle-tanned calves, swung
fists in white gloves; almond and bamboo groves on
alluvial soil near the river

– 172 –

by the time you got to Warradale it was all packed plains clay
sprouting a bleak block of shops, butcher deli greengrocer
push-button phone in a concrete corner bunker

& the playground, a poor second-option, the beach
if your feet lasted infinitely more alluring, another mile or
so in that same westward straight line

clay giving way finally to glorious sand and mirror-blue
healing water. Some of the bible stories we empathised with most
were the ones where hosts welcomed travellers by

washing their feet. We did it for ourselves, standing in
friends’ back yards having hiked from our place
running warm water from their hose over

making red mud

Surprisingly,
Adelaide roses are spectacular