My father lay about the branches of the tree after he died.

His spectral absence left a discolouration in the air. The sepia stain hung in
vaporous discomfit through the Catalpa tree. I saw a funeral-bier there made of long poles. The big Catalpa leaves made heart-shaped holes through the slats of the platform, setting him above my eyes where my hate decomposed while his bones dried in the sun.

The small girl used to sit outside the dunny-door when he was close to the house delighted to be under his gaze. Sitting there waiting, a black cat scratched a huge vent in her face because she was too close to the beloved man. But the stitching pain was better than watching him walk down the hill to the dam – losing his legs, his waist, and finally his shoulders and his head into the wet-grey-mist – lack of contact denied her body, her mind, her sense of smell. When he was close to the house she was outside with mud and the weight of pig-stink, running from ducks and geese who wanted to bite her mouth. Wet sawdust threatened to float her like a sodden-raft as she waded and wallowed. But she was saved in this drift of senses, far from the animal-coop under the kitchen table where a dominion of white starched apron-hems and sensible-shoes flapped and thundered below wafting snorts of dis-content.

Sometimes he would be gone from the farmhouse for weeks and she would rattle the hinges on her cot, pushing against the wooden-frame until the screws came out, going to sleep with the pointed ends pressing into he hands.

There is a big girl now watching the crows pick-out his loving eyes. It was the small girl who learned to be terrified by a voice a mile-high and a busy shifting shadow.
I throw live matches at his corpse, happy to watch the fear burn.
‘The world is not a safe place.’ He wanted me to know, but I insisted it couldn’t be; that it wouldn’t be – to me. Because he also told me I was special. Special-ness is such a sticky toffee thing to carry as a carapace. Pretty things stick to it and predators want to eat it.

‘Do you remember me dad?’ I asked beside your dying bed as your limbs jerked like a stick-insect. A brain-smash making you worthless.
‘Of course I remember you.’
I saw an unexpected gleaming – his eye-lamps – glittering beams focused on the careening into dark, out of control on a lonely road.
‘Do you remember me?’
‘Of course I do. I think you’re wonderful.’
I cannot speak for these words. I am splattered against the perspex of the cubicle which is an institution of wires and tapes and fantastic machines.
‘He thinks I’m wonderful!’
A grandmother myself and I am stripped back to tiny-baby-cells craving the softening of mother’s milk; a father’s shielding hand.
‘He thinks I’m wonderful..’ before he is yanked from trolley to trolley – a train carriage lined-up – slowing for the trip into timelessness.

This moment I have yearned for: he is finally immobilised. He can’t rail at me ‘slut’ or ‘bitch’, or he won’t. He can’t threaten to kill me anymore, since he won’t ask of me any more supreme sacrifices for being.

I hear him call from the arms of the tree. I hear him fade into the soft dust of the stars. I have lost the smell of him from out of my nostrils of shaving-soap and fine leather skin. Dried sultana grapes sunk in outrageous days of sun remind me of him. They are perfumed nuggets rung of juice and vanity.
We are returned to the elements.