For Scott Weeden

(i)

Tilt the head up. Neck muscle catapult

Where to start? Perhaps in the physical?

stretch & bonds of throat rubber at full pelt.

& the gaze (most important of all) for

appreciating things aerial, non-grounded

aspects of the world now realised now

revealed by negotiations with the orb.

Most will blink. Some will always squint,

but the true believers in the aerial, the keep

your eyes open & your nose clean types,

they will order things in height & altitude.

& don’t forget the losses. The gut-wrenchers,

friend killers felt by all eventually. Lose

your public ground swell. Feet sensation.

Stand on tippee-toes if you must. Overbalance.

You must first fall to gain some height.

(ii)

In ’36 the mother was flight, rocking-

horse underflight.  Born the year Smithy

did his famous thang – not to sure (are you?)

Last gleam of canopy quartz seen

by Himalayan goat herders – Durga’s

striped mount plummeted into an icecap’s

melting alphabet. Or was that the year

gremlins took the American, Amelia

in her sexy silver Lockheed, twin boom

elegance rain-ditched off Saipan, sunk

now in archaic geographies of place

name usage. It may as well have been

Atlantis, Lyonesse, Brigadoon. Couldn’t

navigate her way outa a wet paper bag

they said (they are terrible, remember).

Aviatrix missing the year the mother flies.

(iii)

In ’42 the mother hid under cow’s udders

spilled bloated milk urns at the first sound

of the aerial strum, the deep bass Rolls Royce

-Merlins converged on the Darling Downs,

UFO Encounters, the same day gravity is stuffed

drew new song-lines on old Jarowair earth.

(Big band, Swing) tarmacs pushed aside

the scrub from cape to bight. Twentieth

century child labour – plane spotters. Hello

to the new invaders (cultural). Young bucks,

Amelia’s gifted but untried children parked

spanking B-24 Liberators beneath black wattle,

coolibah hangars camouflage nets beaded

with gum leaves, 500 pound drop bears.

The hangars now machinery sheds, tarmacs

Shire councilled over farm peace reclaimed

the war spirit. Few visible signs remain.

A dead grass park, a brass plaque, end era.

(iv)

Post-modernism’s got war though. Vietnam

came to the Downs too. Friend’s father

missed Canungra dust-off with broken base

football shoulder. Some flights did not return.

Canberra bombers reclaimed the peace crop.

Two-seater, jet engined howls over Nui Dat,

Long Tan, Khe Sanh, more place names greasy

with history’s cordite residue. The Australian

knack of making do with nothing. .303’s &

shorts stopped the Japanese. Long-range desert

patrols garbed a future SAS. The ism’s ignited

clouds; cluster, fuel air, napalm, nuclear. The cool

vernacular of school boys, die-cast dream war

shouldered .22’s cadets-green saplings reached

for the sky. F4-Phantoms, all shark teeth & bite.

Laika’s fur consumed by cold war friction.

(v)

1969 & the son is inserted in the landscape.

Buoyed on by the biggest aerial display of all –

moonshot, b/w windows of opportunity more

computing power in this machine than theirs?;

Apollo, god of poetry, the deadly archer

hoisted Saturn rocket javelins through the mind’s

stratosphere. The Van Allen belt snaking

like Wonder Woman’s golden lasso.  Could’ve

used her invisible jet in Nam too, US pilots

no match for MIG 21’s needed a top gun

school of hard knocks. Gargarin the farmer’s

son (never saw Darling Downs/Ukrainian sister

land) fallen neatly into cosmic downflight.

CCCP/SNAFU gone the way of space race

acronyms, burnt up on language re-entry.

(vi)

supper club chairs left to swell in palm-heat.

The Skylab decade found kids faking it; space

junk blackened tin edges taken into science class.

Crippled solar panels repaired by sexual revolution.

WA got the fireworks display. The son obsessed

with disaster – father’s feet never left the ground.

He never entered the aerial; downflight took him

with a cluster galaxy of black hole cells. Didn’t

get his chance to pat the Horsehead Nebula,

telescopic sight fixed on a horizontal roo’s head

as the People’s Temple sent Kool-Aid messages

on/off pulses of human passivity; 900 shooting stars.

He recalled the greatest aerial disaster of the 70’s

happened on the ground, two jumbo’s cannibalised

each other on the Canary Islands (580 dead).

“Space/memory is only an hour away

if your car/mind could go straight upwards”.

(vii)

The eighties opened with Project Blue Book.

Yorky bought his own UFO photos to school,

silver triangles menaced his alluvial plain farm.

This was not foreign to our MGM landscape.

The aerial was extraterrestrial, Bogong moth fury

at night tennis, close encounters of the love letter

kind passed from the back seat of the St Mary’s bus;

girl’s hands were tentacles that could not be held.

Little hairy men peering through bedroom windows,

‘The Dalby Peeper’, ‘Billy Barbwire’, ‘Lenny Ovaltine’

& the old bum who every five steps used to look up

into the aerial & flinch; foo fighters raining death.

Billy, who traced his mantra onto children’s palms,

‘G is for girl G is for good. B is for boy B is for bad’

filed away in the fat of repressed town memories.

It was at Thruppy’s place the son saw Columbia

lift off from Cape Canaveral, booster rockets

sliding away like primary friendships; some

renewable, some Challenger lost as the mother

woke the son in 1986 with broken radio news.

(viii)

The aerial hammered rural towns with thunderstorms,

the blue-black electro-charge of kids rocking tin rooves;

a teen scene of grounded boredom & pissing off on

war stickered BMX/dragster missions to Shit’s Creek.

Or the fabled night dares; an assemblage of schoolboys

at the Barley Board Cricket Oval, one compound bow

& arrows that disappeared into the aerial’s nervous system,

learned behaviours – those who ran from the aerial

& those who stood their ground. & the inevitable

Ameliaesque grief; the son’s first crush, wheat blonde

Karen Straub, her crop-duster father coming to grief

in plane garrotted powerlines & family moving away

to Toowoomba, far from memory’s decaying orbit.

& Mr Rush who drove the only taxi, his last fare

out to the Dalby Aerodrome & a single gunshot

wound to the head; flies nesting in the incestuous

aerial of small town talk.

(ix)

More armoured spirit returned to the Downs;

Black hawks and Iroquois’ peppered the aerial

over Bowenville, buzzing cattle, the sodden

wheat bag thump of rotors bought war tinnitus

back to the ancestral tarmacs & crate legends

of brand new spitfires, kitty hawks buried post

WW2 in Acland’s abandoned coal mines. In

downflight, one Chinook, some Mirages,

the swing-wing miracle F1-11, & occasionally

a glider from the Downs Soaring Field, all

albatross tension fibres crash-tackle white glass.

& later the Singaporean Air Force, its state

having to beg Malaysia for serious aerial time,

took to the Darling Downs skies too, bussed

in each morning from Toowoomba, Oakey’s

fibro houses lacking some quality of sprawl.

(x)

& the aerial landscape itself; jasper smooth

nankeen kestrels, silo-wise, skim the tin sheds

tractor-holed, a corrugation of warm air currents,

parabolic scope & the stereo blood grapple.

Or, over the protected blue-grass road-side empire,

the largesse of black falcons, letter-winged kites’

black, grey & white fuselage, jump-jet precision

strikes, mini-furies control the Warrego highway.

The false stumps of mopokes, galahs & red-rumped

parrots harvesting ground level grass seed,

butcher-birds & magpies – nest enforcers flexing

throat muscles. A pink pelican the son’s friend

saw once, scientist painted at Lake Broadwater;

a flush of wingspan spread over an agate horizon.

The migratory nudge of constellations, so bright

in the aerial of country-night, a pole star for sons.

(xi)

& finally the ones who didn’t make the aerial last.

Scotty Weeden, who the son & his friend’s once

defended the ’81 post-flood cricket nets from—

Archie, Ezzy, the tough kids who walked away,

perch frying on the cracked silt, oven-top wickets.

Scotty, whose own aerial ended on the ground,

his four wheel drive momentarily airborne on Fraser

Island, eskies, rods, beer all free of gravity, aerials’

greatest enemy. Scotty, who’s old man owned

The Windsor, a Dalby economic wheat-dream

gone wrong & who once carved up a rival team

in a Bundaberg carnival, the son sending him

through a perfect gap in the ground’s defence.

Scotty, hazy as the binocular smudged Halley’s

Comet, a revolution now in the mind’s eye every

seventy-six years; the aerial view & all that.

(xii)

A postscript aerial: the son having flown now

from the Darling Downs, views it through satellite

photo generated bands of brown & darker brown

shades, the continent a fox-tail colour, wind-snipped

most of us existing on a thin black topsoil that dusts

the mother’s curtains, sifts onto the Great Rift Valley

of lino ripped under the legs of her kitchen chairs,

& waxes the half-wallpapered living room. The son,

in box after box, removing his last hint of the aerial

Aircraft of World War 2, Great Disasters of the World,

UFO Encounters, the same day gravity is stuffed

into plastic bags in the Kuta nightclub district;

supper club chairs left to swell in palm-heat.

A one-minute’s silence for the aerial to catch

its breath, to stand on tippee toes & get its

balance back. Amelia, hit by an air pocket.