Hemiglossed

Dad sits, crushed panadol and formula milk gravity fed into his belly. 

On tv: sourdough, a sear of steak, a dressing of diced peach, torn mint, fresh red chilli— 

He dozes, won’t turn it off. 

He’s fishing, line in a river, breath rasping, catching 

like breeze in the cotton tree, shivering under sweat-drenched blankets—

once we sat by the oyster beds, silent for the stretch of hours it took a swallowtail

butterfly to drift from mangrove bank to the caravan park. 

No-one asked to move on.

On tv: a length of sugarcane, grasped, twisted. Juice catches the sun. Remember 

the soot, the hungry flame of cane season? The storm leaning over the range, heavy, dark, 

the passionfruit vine leaning over the wooden fence? The ox heart planted there for iron. 

The fence warped with damp and the weight of thriving. 

One last drop of chalky milk descends through Dad’s tube. I push a syringe full of water. 

On tv: they pound ginger and thyme to a paste with a pestle the same weight

as we use to crush Dad’s pills. 

This is not so much about passionfruit, ginger and sugar cane fire as it is the fingerling bream caught on line washed up, wound around mangrove root, retrieved, untangled 

and kept on its coke-bottle spool in the back corner of the shed—Dad won’t let go 

of such things, allows only my hands to drag it back to use. This is about how long 

it took, to learn to sit still with the driftwood, the cod-hole, the deepening disappearing. 

I am waiting for breath the same way I wait for a tug on the line that is not the breeze 

or the tide but a life, leaping and twisting in the sun.