These are the rangelands south of Australian opal fields,

cattle-beaten and itching, red as an angry throat.

They built boomtowns and picked at the orebody,

they found someone and called them no one.

For years, my mother tells me to write

the story of that day in ’81

of her brother Paul and her father

and the invisible thing unwinding in his chest.

They went into the Far West but not as far as Broken Hill

to shoot feral boars on the rangelands,

killers of fair lambs and sugarcane.

Their gray hides shot, the boars dropped and air

rippled like a curtain.

It was seething in the lining of her father’s lungs —

that quiet thing dividing and mutating

in the breathing space.

Paul, that blue child of seventeen,

who punched the basketball referee

and was dubbed trouble, broke

his father’s fall and carried him over his shoulder

to the farmhouse.

“What we did not know then,” my mother says,

rubbing her hands. “What we did not know.”

Her father sold newspapers, always the dark

print of it on his hands except on Christmas and Sundays

when the shop closed early and he came home

to work and breathe in a little white shed in the garden,

asbestos in the walls to keep it warm.

The cells proliferate and eighteen months later

he is gone and thirty years later

my mother forbids sunscreen and frying pans

coated with Teflon, all things that might seep

into the bloodstream and one day

in an airless summer

I am on a westbound train and look to those distant lands,

dry as newspaper,

and see a fence of fire.

My mother turns her life to fiction

but I have learned to tell it as well

and I do not have her eyes but I am nothing

without her DNA and devotion.

I preserve her until cell death.