Omeo Highway, Great Dividing Range, Australia

Bairnsdale
The sky is starling-filled granite, this open country
veneered with estates sudden as dark water rising. Main Street
clusters with pensioners
combing back their hair in cafeterias
and blinking over cappuccino, the Herald Sun, alone.
At the Rotunda auctioneers admire bank windows, reflective
as cattletrucks
rattling empty toward mountains.
Cicada husks cling to fencelines in pre-prefab paddocks.
Mares buck the abattoir scent curling at town’s edge, where hammerfall and lo-ing
flattens into the null.

 

Bruthen
Like caravans at a crossroads, the cows stand
monolithic in this quasi-primal scenery: chewing
at the floodplain trees, crooked beside roadhouses leaned back from the horizon.

 

Ensay
The town clenched around its highway and roadkill, cars tilting
through the disequilibrium unstopping.
The CWA knits, and chainsaws grind at scrublines like incisors.
Somewhere (as trees fall) the ministrations of Radio National.
In the dimly-lit kitchens of farmer widows
weekly appellations
of panic: the fire brigade’s
practice an occult minuet in these dry-mouthed hills
where rabbits thump the blind underground
and eels slide up pussy-willow riverbeds.
In this garden of delights it’s the unquiet that is a landmark
unspoken, encircling
as the sentences of strange ghosts.

Swifts Creek
The creek bends over stone, a snake unpeeling itself. Hats gather
at the servo and trucks slough past
unloading clear-fell at the mill. A bus draws in to school, freckled generations
at its windows. Up the road, the cemetery
is carved with phonebook names.

Omeo
These mountains locked as a grave.
Sheep stare through seasons. Workdogs howl on chains
and fill ringbarked afternoons. Weather speculations
drawl out the half-open windows of 4WDs
in town for groceries.
Locals thumb their belt hoops. A crow scours the hills. Lawnmowers are droning
orchestrations of dominion.

Benambra
The sky almost a void, Kosciusko its distant steeple.
In the cleared valleys boxwood stumps gnarl
amid haystacks inert as tractors rusting on blocks.
The weatherboards here, scant and haunted
in the bawling frames of wind, scatter out darker altitudes
where hair-trigger farmers stark with short answers lope across taut daylight.
Quince and crab apple rot in dropped circles
while scarecrows mute as doppelgänger survey the wild churchyard
long empty of its song.

CONTENTS: APRIL 2011