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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.
Brendan Ryan's second collection of poetry, A paddock
in his head, was published by Five Islands Press in 2007. A third collection, A
Tight Circle, was published by Whitmore Press in March 2008.
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