Sandra Ridley
Farther / Father
Farther / Father
Our dead call out our dead / you show your filthy face
You useless tit / you runt / you piece of shit / a shame
Unleashed by plain-talk / begging before a threshing
From the old butcher / your leather strap / unbelted
Crescent buckle for a skinning / hiding / each of us /
Slickened with blood / held down in your hinterland
Each barren mile unabating / say mercy.
*
What dwells in the dog’s sleep / unbounded / darkness
The closer you are to the sun the more difficult you are
To see / penumbral / who runs from whom / until kept
Down / cowering / I do not move / you will not move.
You are no less dangerous than you were as you drag
Your bones / field stones / we never once wept upon
The firmament / eight children left with the lone wife
Who would not carry the quiet / the final cardiac pall
Paled thirty years / crescent moons / scars strapped
Below the heart.
*
A finisher with a surly disposition / better run boy
Run / before the shadow on an August day / flight
Of the dove interrupted / who should feel shame /
Worthless idlers / caught neurotic / we are taught
You will not be tamed.
*
Dirige / domine / deus meus / ignominious father / aberration
Uttered solemn / all you missed is nothing / noli me tangere /
Don’t touch me.
*
Each child dragged by its hair across the linoleum /
Given lip / good for nothing / illicit / dust / dusk-lit
Let these bygones / cease holding on to me.
*
We brace in the centre / attention / nothing more than this
Far-fetched ruckus / rot-gut fuss / a latched door farmhouse
Taunting / the slap-board remains / rants / lashed feverish
Your day’s demands / fraught / cling to the bleak / this filth
In plain sight / I am a man possessed.
*
Beyond two graves / yours and the child’s / a sole
Pine fallen from a lack of forest / the sun-downed
Dove-wing unfolds / under night / your closeness
Lies too close.
*
Birch box and iron nails / buried under the cover of lichen
Scrolled years / each letter etched by lime / faded shame
Be a lesser phantom / of the bleak / you will receive no less
No blossom braided in the child’s hair.
*
Rosemarie / rose of thorn / rose up from prairie
Wherever you have gone you will not take her /
Unfollowed to a harrow / kin / stone / infanta
Sub rosa / only her eyes cry.
*
Our dire wolf / bewildered / breath taken in plain sight /
Before the sun is farthest south / ruck-sacked / a shadow
Across the face / red zenith / dog-light / Dead Dog Creek
In the faithful hour / his small body filled with buckshot
Carry him / carry him.
*
Undreamt / the sleeper remains untouched.
*
I’ve been meaning to say / I belly-ache / useless tit
Found the rain barrel with our long-drowned dove.
*
After the diminishing / dirt body kicked against kitchen wall /
Kept alive / what mercy has lessened / quietened as we speak
Of light / spoiled / cry-babying / a bunkum transubstantiated
Our cunning remains within.
*
Any radiance seen is due to perspective / at the first ascension
Night cold will come as reprieve / as rescue / we sad animals
All of us wet behind the ears / we still drag our own wet skins.
*
Even death is a quiet / even the fiercest sleep / after another day
An hour bent to water / a catch-song shudders from the diviner /
A bough cut for the wellspring.
*
Unearthing the horizon / uncertain if the sun is low / west
Or rising east / luminous / hourglass tipped to the wheat /
Ghosts / our harvest sheen.
*
Holder of the dog’s bones / night-fallen creek / current home
Borne back / broken / the limp body / still writhing / we will
Never depend upon our eyes.
*
Submerged / without air / within water / us / small-sacked
In the last hour / the equinox / relinquished / moonward
Out of my sight / a wife’s tale / we find you not as we want
You / still where you are / dead on the floor / facing down
The long shadow / incalculable / we await the whimper
Eyes lowering / descent of the casket / no axis spinning /
Stars dying / no / they are already gone.
***
