the pact

 Off the backroad, where the sun

is an Arnott’s cracker and the fences

slacken, my father shifts gear to pull up

scrub, un-tarps to wade by ridge, eyes

the slow descent of land & keens. There, 

‘mong needles that crunch & snap with 

each chest fall, he softens his shoulder 

to butt & tests recoil. Before the bang

the jump—that sudden quieting ever after

sweat licks his forehead & he mutters,

tomorrow—sensing perhaps in me, 

young animal, a laboured desire

to see the world narrowed.

Skinned, slung and washed clean with

a bar of rubber soap, he slackens himself

again to earth & grins. Come on, son—

he lifts. Up on his wide shoulders,

I raise my fists, a giant’s horns—

a mountainside that pitches

a blaze of trees into

a purpling horizon.

By campfire that night, he recalls catches: 

finches, a baby kookaburra once, fairywrens

sometimes, & even a tiger snapped in the silver 

teeth of the cage’s door—the gully, his favourite

spot, turned copper with blood. My father then took 

spade to skull, heard the hollowing crack of bone, 

& being his first kill, a child of 10—wept. 

Of course

he neglects to mention this: that unclean end. Such

stories are the burden of women. Says nothing

of the way the snake reeled, pulled back for

its last breath, the shimmer of its opal eyes

& his boyish tears pooling dust. Why 

would he? Death suspends itself

in silence, as if a declaration of the slow

maturation of generations, a looking glass

that rarely looks back

on the colourlessness

that precedes it. 

These broken details—the burial that followed, 

his scolding father, the mound of earth that 

he plucked free of weeds for months after—

are woven into a subtle & elegant prayer that

my grandmother gives for all men as she rubs her rosary

by generator’s light & watches my mother, bower

bird, bowed over the aluminium haze, the chipped 

china of many a distant family, passing through,

passed between her chipped hands. She scrubs,

sighs, winces, rinsing, before she lays it to rest—

an old story, a surrogate reverence as much

for the heaviness of the men

beside them. 

At first light, my mother remains silent, 

as my father takes me out into pastures

not yet hayed & shows me how to

handle that gun, the same way his 

father did when he was a boy. The heat

of my breath against the cold of the 

action, click & sight. The slick of

grease & the rusty scent of blood.

The heartbeat in my fingertip. I saw

then the length of the world &

made for the first time in my

life, a pact: to never speak

this deep unsettling.