I tried
to get back to you,
tending your greenery
my mother complained
You water like a Pom, too stingy.
when I was a child
fairy limbed
we planted watermelons
in mounds of dirt we never saw shoot
the yellowed paddocks
backgrounded
in dry relief
warm winds
different seasons to weather
in the next town
we placed marigold
seedlings under protection
of nectarine canopy
one night I slept
in that tree, blankets
nexus between
branch & child
the silver princess
eucalypt took eight men
to heft from truck
over — those deep deep gutters
that we had sometimes swum
in flood / could there
have been such flows
in such a place? —
through the gate
and into the waiting
hole, the spectacle
attracted children & dogs
when I was eleven
you sold your butcher shop
and brought home
a travelling green dream
the bare truck &
sign painted on the side
Perry’s Portable Plants
though there was hardly
an interval graced
before it was bogged
down in
suburban inertia, so
another butcher shop
in a bigger town
at thirty-nine
you had a heart attack
at forty-four
your breath
shortened
as though
in anticipation
the sloping hillside
of Christmas trees
off the Hume marks
the halfway-home point
in the close
interior of the ute
I will you
not to speak
you and I together
in this space
are only travelling
there is nothing
to atone with now
but words —
trees gently
growing
in reconjured spaces
shapes of green
that continue
to shoot
I type it, then —
‘my son’s face lights up
as he sees you
and runs into your arms’
Dani Netherclift lives in Wathaurong country (Geelong) with her husband and two children. She is currently working on an elegiac poetry manuscript about her father. She has had recent words in Otoliths, Mascara Literary Review & e/merge magazine via Emerging Writers Festival, as well as on a street in Adelaide via Raining Poetry in Adelaide, and has upcoming work in Swamp Journal and others. She has previously been published in Meanjin Quarterly and Cordite Poetry Review.