What It Feels Like Poem by Brendan Ryan

It is two fathers punching each other in the footy sheds
shadows extending over the river flats

over the bachelor nursing a long neck on his porch
over the epileptic twisting on the me hanic's floor.

It is a chorus of crows in the red gums by the river.
It is a woman avoiding loose gravel on the road to her lover.

It is the sound of water foaming up in paddocks.
It is the scrape of hoof prints on the cattle track.

It is the one finger wave above the steering wheel
a row of fox skins stretched along a fence,

a farmer growing up once his parents have died
three unmarried sisters avoiding eyes on their way out of church.

It is a gust of wind shuddering through a row of eucalypts
teenage lovers divorcing twenty years later.

My rubber boots sinking into family sayings
a man taking to his car with an axe.