They stitched their lives into my days,
Hawkesbury fishermen, with a smoke
stuck to their bottom lips, bodies bent
forward, inspecting a haul-net’s wing
draped from a clothesline. Their hands
darting through mesh, holding bone
net-needles, maybe a special half-needle
carved from tortoise shell. Their fingers,
browned by clusters of tobacco tar
and freckles, slippery with speed—
they wove everything they knew
into the mesh, along with the love they had,
or had lost, or maybe not needed.
During my school holidays I watched them
and came to love this craft
of mending. In our backyard by the river
surrounded by copper tubs, brimming
with tanning soup, brewed from
bloodwood and wild-apple bark.
These men could cut the heart clean
from a fish with a swipe of a fillet knife,
and fill buckets with gut—flecked
with the iridescent backs of flies—
as it fermented into liquid fertilizer.
I’d water my father’s beds of vegetables,
rows of silver beet, a fence of butter beans—
In the last of the sun, I’d watch
our peacock spread its tail; the hose
sprayed water from a water tank, house high
fed by gravity.