SHEEP RUN
no crow overhead, just blue sky, an
abandoned shack, windowless, burnt out, a
landscape of distant ironbark approaching,
for the next decade, in every space not filled
in, by an old sheep, weak, malnourished,
gone down in the bare paddock, sheep that
the owner drives past, leaving her to the
slow life, the movement of night, the burning
sun, her lambs were as silent as the land,
cooked to death from lack of shelter, so she
stood at the sight, where they had crumbled
into dust beneath her feet, around noon we
pulled up, on the edge of the claypan, dad's
dogs leapt out of the station wagon window,
& were onto her, before the car had stopped,
we saw her go down on one knee, swimming
in the heat, the largeness of her fight for life,
the shock & roll of her yellow eye, the white
dot of her in the distance, how easily
we could all go up, one match lit, one ill
thought, one wrong move, too many guns
loaded against the landscape, the odds
weighed up, she was out manoeuvred, by
two silly town dogs, taking her down, the
deep pain of bites to the face, the slow
seconds of our sheep run, our shrieks that
shot towards those dogs like bullets, the big
dull greasy wool of her collapsing, fragile
underneath, as if the wind could pick her up,
& roll her along like a tumbleweed, even after
the dogs were frightened off, she did not
forgive us, the stress of separation from the
flock, on that poor old sheep, who stood her
ground on skulls & bones, the slow white
salt rising up, to sting in the cuts, on her soft
tan nose, we left her kneeling in blood, in a
stillness that observed her & took her in, as
space will surround a stretch of fence, in a
big desert, she is an australian merino, who
slowly fills in time, until she is only the sun, a
twisted tree, in an old red country, coating the
fleece, already drifting off, like rising cloud,
caught in wire, flies for a kilometre smell the
blood, the land is blown with injured wool |
