BRENDAN RYAN

Territorial Claims

He stands on the cattle track watching patches of dirt
thinking of the fifteen thousand he’s forked out for hay.
It’ll see us through the winter.
The moments away
from the folding up of clothes, bedtime songs.
He’s walking out into the bull paddock
looking for rain.

He cuffs a fly. You’ll die in debt.
Some future when debt is growing faster than grass.
Still there’s always some poor bastard –
A neighbour in jail, another farmer
nursing his wife in Bone Marrow House.
Wind-beaten shadowy patches
where the topsoil has been scuttled.

Tomorrow he will smudge the paddocks
with an old set of railway tracks
hoping some green pick might take off,
find release the way he keeps to the centre
of the ground when umpiring the reserves.

Thursday night, his job to organise pies after training –
something solid, like telling his father he can get the cows in.
Let him wander back into that territory
of work and dreams, of being useful again.

A ridge the bulls have scraped against
is beginning to fall away.
He loves watching them kick up dust
rub their shoulders in the dirt
as they announce their territorial claims,
before the vanquished stumbles away
head nodding, ashamed as a farmer
off-loading heifers at the saleyards.

In the ’67 drought, his father survived on five thousand pounds.
He turned over every paddock in search of rain.
Send her down Hughie!
What have I inherited besides cows and land?

The time before motorbikes.
The time after breakfast, deciding jobs for the day.
The time he saw his father’s nose bloodied by a ram.
The time he fishtailed away from the driveway.
The time it rained, the time it rained.

He grew up watching his father being bounced around
on a tractor seat, until his back seized
forcing him to eat his tea standing at the fridge.
A dead cypress has bowed the wires of the boundary fence.
He turns, heads for home, scuffing his boots in the dirt he knows.