WHEAT BELT
The Salt, The Salt
pressed her against the fence and kissed the tender-hearted
neck as the wind snivelled at the wire, sifted her apple hair:
‘take off your shoes’, she whispered, ‘take them off, mate’:
the ground hard, drained, dried, baked down, and we stood
soft-footed and she started to cry, cried (gently), (quietly):
‘it’s what we are,’ she said, waving a hand at the silent white:
‘I know, I know’, and I kissed the tears and kissed the moist
thin arms, ‘but one day the desert will shoot with leaf, and sing’:
‘do you think so?’ she sighed, ‘isn’t that just a lovely story?’
the tears and arms were salty as if the flood of salt itself had
claimed her, risen up within her, joined her to the lost land,
drowned land whose bones of gimlet gums, of salmon gums,
clawed, and they fingered, they pointed black from the crusted
face where sodium chloride gathered and glittered, celebrating
the curse, ruin being the lot, all under blue being white, white
with black, and gone the sap and green, tart, sweet to the touch,
and the pink of timber, and the copper bark, glossy: here, no
flesh of country that gave, but two ravens, high, that clasped,
stared, birds of raucous throat, they stared with all-seeing
eyes, stared as if we had done wrong, as if we did not belong,
scolded the trespass, calling out our names, they seemed to
cite, recite our names as we toed the ground as we peered,
squinted, blinked, as I kissed the tears, kissed the pale neck:
and after a while she quieted in my arms, looked up at the
clear aboriginal sky, up, and up: ‘seen enough,’ she said, and
we aimed the Commodore at Wagin, Narrogin, driving with
the radio playing Sinatra: ‘Chicago, Chicago, dee da dee da
dum’: ‘never liked that creep’, and she snapped off the voice:
‘nah, me too, what the hell did he know?’ and we listened
instead to the air hitting the car, flushing through the windows,
and told each other stories to ease the journey as we drove on
over the loam, the sand, old, so old, soils bared for pasturing
and for shallow-rooted cropping, where lone gums watched
and stands of remnant thicket, woodland, testified, soils in
whose breast salt and water lurked, waited for hungering men