Poet of the Day: Philomena van Rijswijk (She isn't telling and I'm not asking - Present) **Tasmanian

THE LIE OF THE LAND

I swore she'd grow up like a fat swamp gum lacing a hundred-acre paddock,
not a maidenhair, mildewed with mediocrity, in a two dollar pot.
Having only just begun to finger my own barbed wire fences
when she came along, the questing whips of my tender digits
had been butchered back
by the cutting edge of pragmatism.

Every 3 a.m. I worried the beads of her being female as though
she had been born with a congenital defect that would soon
magnetize pigshooters spotlighters torturers beach rapists
broken beer glass and well-behaved silent rage.
She would have run off, if I had let her- I caught her one day
heading for the thistled horse paddocks; after that I kept her tender feet
unshod and let the bindi-eyes do the policing with their
peculiarly masculine and wordless perseverance.

Hush little baby, wimminsingin's the word, I lullabied her,
the cicadas screaming like lunatics,
hating my own oxlike body that had grown twice as foreboding
in the blinking of an I.
Papa don't need to find us no mockinbird, I drilled,
hanging over the stained stone sink
while the drainhole torpedoed my life/liness away
with ricochetting bubbles of Sunlight and grease.

Pushing his worn underpants into unexplored corners with my toes,
haphazardly swiping an equator of bath scum
a million times a zillion times without even caring,
my planet shrunk smaller and duller like a helium balloon left to itself
in the corner of a vacated galaxy - heavier and heavier -
heavier than breath, when always, before, it had seemed lighter.

And if mumma's mockinbird don't sing,
mumma don't need no diamond ring, I lied
while she elbowed against my side in the double bed -
that polyester/cotton battleground of the bloody corpulent feud,
the silent tug-o'-war in which the rope is not of jute but teased and plied
from a female body my own pulled this way that way this way
though the man always has an advantage his pale soft imperial feet planted
square in tough tradition and the whole macho muscled universe on his side.

Oh! how she listened while I lied!
Her eyes paterson's-curse-blue and pig-bristled clean and prised-open
like the sky when you're thirsty far away from home and you're somewhere
you've never been before but familiar-smelling.
How she gobbled my lies, and I did too;
they fed her and she grew and grew!
You can, she bullies at me now.
You are, she shoulders me with triumph.
You've taught me the Braille map of the world, she cries.
While all along I know she's watched me fumbling
my own flat wasteland
of endless, gutless lies.