Cow (January)

[For Brendan Ryan] January childhood was walking jerseys past the channel wheels and bulrushes outside Rochester to the muck yard and high rails of milking sheds to watch teat-cups suck the best of all into dreamy vats. While July childhood had come to Melbourne, to hours spent repeating Cisco and Pancho cowboy games imitating TV’s black-and-white history of the fall of the West, dress-ups of Sioux and 2/6d pistols from Coles, around the apple trees of the back garden, those last months of the milkman setting solid bottles at the gate as his horse plodded on towards Port Phillip Bay.