(i)

Where to start? Perhaps in the physical?
Tilt the head up. Neck muscle catapult
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 too 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,
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)

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 friends 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, whose 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.