a rabbit in my chest

For the dVerse Monday haibun prompt “Summer“, let me tell you about my day….

 

A trip to the GP turns into an afternoon in the Goulburn ED. A triage nurse takes my history and some blood, then runs an ECG as we chat about how hard it’s been for nurses during covid, how good the change of government is for women, about #MeToo and wonder “you too?”. Then I wait again, until someone else comes to take me for a CT scan.
First some saline through the canula and a cool tingle rushes through my chest triggering another thump. Then I am waiting as the machine whirrs, and tells me: “take a breath and hold it… now breathe normally”. It is hard to breathe normally on command. Then the iodine solution is pumped in and there is a rush of heat to my face and between my legs and a strange taste in my mouth. Again, I take a breath and hold it on command as the machine whirrs.
Dressed again, though still speckled with ECG electrodes and with the canula in my arm, I wait again until a doctor calls me through. The tests have all come back clear. So the chest pain? …likely pleurisy, long covid. The thumping beat, like a rabbit kicking? “yes, I heard it – ectopic ventricular beats”, tentatively “are you still… regular? Given your age…”.

Autumn inside me,
no summer heat flush, just a
rabbit in my chest

where did summer go?

The Thursday dVerse “meeting the bar with the Constanza” challenge was to write a series of at least 5 three line stanzas with the rhyme scheme a/b/b, a/c/c, … in which the first lines form a poem in their own right, which is then placed at the end. Oh, and it has to be in iambic tetrameter as well.  Ummm…. okay, here goes:  

 

We watched the summer come and go,
the fields turn green with summer rain,
then gold with ripening of the grain.

Now bright leaves fall from the gingko,
to reds and browns they add their gilt
as autumn lays her patchwork quilt.

Against blue sky, bare branches show
and a half-moon peers through their net
at pigeons roosting in silhouette.

Flocks of autumn carrion crows
scrounge fields now brown and stubble-strewn.
The winter’s chill comes all too soon,

so while we wait for winter’s snow,
we’ll fill the woodshed to its beams
to give us warmth for winter dreams.

Now build the fire, and in its glow
dream of spring and a greening land
and plan the next spring’s plantings, and

ask ourselves, where did summer go?
In just a moment it was past.
But briefly too will winter last.

We watched the summer come and go,
now bright leaves fall from the gingko.
Against blue sky, bare branches show
flocks of autumn carrion crows.
So while we wait for winter’s snow.
build up the fire, and in its glow
ask ourselves, where did summer go?

 

I’ve followed Björn’s  lead in going for a seasonal theme – autumn for us down here in the southern hemisphere. Unfortunately I haven’t taken a photo of the gingko trees on campus which have turned brilliant yellow, but here are the pigeons in silhouette, against a typically blue Canberra winter sky with the moon peeking through the branches. 

what to plant in autumn

I planted the mice
all in a neat row,
and this year I reap
what last year I sowed.
Now gnawing of seeds
bids me understand
that again time for planting
of mice is at hand.
So I lay out my traps,
with a morsel of cheese,
tomorrow I’ll plant them
below the snow-peas.
And I hope that this year
– a change would be nice –
I’ll harvest some peas
instead of just mice.

Things to plant in autumn in the southern tablelands: peas, broad beans, broccoli, spinach, mice. 

two snapshots and three short films

I (1700 to 1730)
White lines flicker by like heartbeats
on a black macadam river.
Hills flow slowly by
beneath an indeterminate sky –
pastel-apricot blends imperceptibly to dove grey,
before the rising blue flood of night.

II (1800)
From the kitchen window the sky is a flower,
pansy-hued:
above the scalloped edge of the ridge
an inch of golden yellow ribbon
trims a blanket of purple velvet
specked with the first few stars.

III (1900)
Above the trees,
whose presence is implied
only by the stars that they hide,
Orion has tipped over sideways –
a fallen statue beside a milky stream.

IV (0530 to 0540)
Against a background of a billion bright dust-motes
a scrap of ice and stone,
heated to incandescence,
inscribe its path on the sky.
Blink and it’s gone, but another,
and another,
follows. Lower down,
four planets have lined up to point out
where the sun will later rise.

V (0640 to 0700)
Light comes before colour:
a white sky seen through a picket-fence of black tree trunks.
Then, a confusion of hues; yellows, greens,
and last night’s apricot now fully ripened.
Then the day washes downwards from the sky,
and the tree trunks are silver against blue.

 

Some explanation of IV: I got up at about 0530 this morning to look at the eta aquariid meteor shower. After trundling up the driveway and out the gate, and down the road a little and not seeing anything (other than the four planets currently in alignment) I decided “sod this, it’s too cold”. As I turned to go back up the hill I finally saw a meteor, so I lay down on the road for a bit and saw six in quick succession.  

And this is what I’ve started to think of a pansy coloured sky:

a stutter in the seasons

Summer refuses to depart,
though the sun’s daily arc
now starts well north of east
and ends far short west.
Reluctant to leave,
though the lights are dimmed
she drags out another encore.

And this hesitation confuses:
only half-way to winter
but beneath the soil
barely-rested bulbs
raise their new green spires
like a scattering of uncertain applause
through last season’s still green foliage.

This succession of Indian summers, in which
any colder day seems a transient glitch, is
a stutter in the seasons –
so summer plays again and again.

But the sun cannot be fooled –
he rises and inscribes
an autumnal arc across the sky.

 

Some years ago a friend visiting from Sydney asked “do you get many sunsets here?”, to which I gave the obvious answer “yes, every day”. But I guess they’re more noticeable here – the kitchen window faces west, towards a long ridge, and he was looking out that window at the sunset when he asked. The point along the ridge where the sun sinks changes with the seasons, like a sundial calendar.  So even though it feels like summer at the moment, the point where the sun is going down is well to the north now of where the summer sun sinks. In the southern hemisphere the sun heads north for the winter, not south.  🙂  

lower right cheek

For the dVerse Monday haibun prompt “flower moon“:

Glimpsed for a moment through the thick autumn fog, stubble coloured sheep speckle stubble covered paddocks. A wheel thumps over a dead ‘roo, a fresh bloody mass smeared further across the tarmac by my passing. I turn up the fan to dispel the mist growing, by some sympathetic magic, on the inside of my windscreen.
Watching the car thermometer dip below freezing as I roll down into the valley, I ponder this morning’s poetry prompt: flower moon. In the northern hemisphere anemones, bluebells and lupins are flowering, and corn is being planted.

On the earth’s arse, just
a week away from winter –
no flowers here, mate.

Friday afternoon school run

Parents wait at the gate for the cages to be opened
and the flock,
bright as grass parrots in their green and yellow,
to come flying out.

Hands are held across the road:
look right, look left,
look right again –
walk straight across, don’t run!

morning commute II

A somewhat late response to the dVerse Tuesday prompt “Blue Tuesday”. Work’s been busy lately, lots of deadlines looming, lots of meetings, lots of things to “operationalize” (how do you do a vomiting emoji in WordPress???)…  So I’m hiding in my office with the door closed and the light off, typing as quietly as I can to preserve a bit of the blue sky of home before I have to actualize somebody’s roadmap or elevate some excellence.  But Teams just pinged me a “join meeting” so this will have to do:

I have come down from the hills,
where spider webs glitter with frost,
where currawongs call greetings,
where kangaroos nod as I pass,
and where the sky is saturated with blue,
a blue that pours down, over me,
into me, filling and overflowing.

above the city II

On the hill above the city,
on an afternoon all green and blue:

Picnics are spread, a tea-party laid out.
A small boy joyfully kicks
a large plush toy down the hill,
as a wedding party poses by the pavilion.
Happily discordant strains
of “happy birthday to you”
drift from a nearby teenage group,
set apart from the many little ones
who are running,
rolling,
laughing
beneath a bright flock of kites.

 

I took my daughter and a couple of her friends for a picnic and kite flying at the Arboretum yesterday. It was one of those perfect Canberra autumn afternoons – mild and sunny, and almost unbearably blue. The sort you want to keep preserved in glass, for later revisiting. 

At least it was perfect until I decided to have a go at rolling down the hill. The kids were having a great time doing it, and who cares what other people think, right? Turns out all those other adults were smarter than me. Barely a quarter of the way down I had to stop, head spinning and almost throwing up. Sigh. Next time I will stick to flying kites.  

above the city I

The string slides through my fingers
as the kite leaps up,
impatient to join the bright flock.

Riding the wind,
string humming in my hand,
it tugs like a fish with each gust –
a dot-dash transmission:
let me go