Happinesswise by Jonathan Bennett

Author:Jonathan Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2018-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

On Occasion

Notes After Fort Worth

It’s a lethal dose margarita, freeze, salt, shiver then slap

that sends us back, no fair crack, to swapping sloppy crap

from Southern Cross boyhoods, night cricket, girls and that.

Footnoting Picnic at Hanging Rock, me humming

“US Forces,” we walk about the old stockyards, here

but not here (you Ballarat, me Cronulla) before we list

at Remington’s The Luckless Hunter, we recognize

that pale-faced Apache as yet another last Aborigine,

one sentenced to brave it alone through ancestral lands,

every lone star a tombstone, every sound a lost noun,

every remorseful painting an additional subtraction.

This is for the tourists. This is not for the tourists at all.

We stall before a vainglorious statue of a cowboy

wrangling a writhing bull: Man triumphs over bronze.

Then heel-and-toe it over Western heroes, star-stamped

into the trail, set to favourably brand history, or its opposite,

as a family films two dudes on horses, neon winks: Sirloin!

As oil-sprung Caravaggios fill museums, contrasting light and crude.

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