scented notes

Monday

Butterfly season
clouds of common browns rise from the leaflitter
swirling through the summer-holiday scented air

Tuesday

The overwhelming complexity of city air:
hot concrete scented steam rising from the pavement
mingles with traffic fumes, jasmine, pine mulch and exotic dinners

Wednesday

Rain, rain, and again rain:
the satisfying scent of brown water as it overspills creek and dam
overlaid with the clean breath of eucalyptus

Thursday

wet leaves glint
in the fresh-washed sunlight, the air smells blue
and a snippet of rainbow hangs in the clouds

Friday

butterflies again,
brown wings slowly beating, as they sip sweetness from the
scraggly roadside Sifton bush

Sutton bonfire night 2023, snapshots

An apricot-satin ribbon of sky
inscribed with skeletal trees
slips below the horizon
as white lines catch the headlights,
flick flick flick
tachycardia fast.

1000 January 30th, last day of summer holidays

10 o’clock and all the have-tos are done,
a hundred should-dos, but not a single one
appeals as a use of a summer day
and so another one just drifts away.
The list of could-dos has items still
but the days, though long, so easily fill
with things that are almost the want-to kind,
until of a sudden we look ahead and find
those endless days that seemed so long
have rushed right past, and summer is gone.

 

I saved up all my annual leave in 2022 so I could take most of January off while the kids were on school holidays. Tomorrow they go back to school and I go back to work, and there are so many things we didn’t get around to doing. Even little things – I meant to spend more writing, do a bit of painting, more gardening. I didn’t even take my clarinet out of its case. But I guess I really needed to do a whole lot of nothing after last year. Now I feel almost ready to go back into the fray, but I’d still rather not. sigh 

winter melts

Winter lies sadly melting in the sink.
An ice-blue sky reduced to an anonymous puddle
in a plastic zip-lock bag.
And for what?
To make way for bargain priced minced meat.
“I’m sorry” I say to the little one,
who just shrugs.
And for a moment I consider telling her:
“It remembers what it was. Water remembers.”
But I do not say it,
because she is not so little anymore,
and would just roll her eyes and say “muuummm”
at such sappy Disney bullshit.
She accepts that snow must make way
for ‘reduced to clear’ minced meat.
And I am sorry for that.

Written for the dVerse prompt “poetics: the blizzard of the self“, to write a poem about winter. I used a bit of poetic licence here, it was actually a bag of hailstones rather than snow that was taken out of the freezer a while ago to make space for ‘reduced to clear’ meat. But snow somehow fitted better with the broader theme than giant hailstones which are themselves due to climate change.
 

1200 December 14th, Goulburn railway bridge

Paint a primary-coloured afternoon:
green, green trees –
not the dull yellow-grey-khaki of eucalypts
but the bright clear greens of picture-book trees.
Dab them with circles of pink and yellow,
to make a thousand tiny plums like Christmas baubles.
Add a sweep of black road
rising in a hump over a railway line,
don’t forget the white lines emphasising the curve.
Now fill in the sky,
just blue, and more blue, and more
until the page is so saturated
it cannot hold any more.
Finish with some fine details:
a pair of train-spotters with their cameras
leaning on the bridge railing, waiting.
Now, save this picture:
fill a bag with blue and green, pink and yellow,
sweet-tart, glossy-smooth but dusty from a passing train,
take it home and pour it into jars,
and add them to the pantry-album of summer afternoons.

1500 January 9th, sans ‘sunroof’

Swooping between potholes
we fly through yellowing green fields,
every window down to let the sky in.
Its blue-heat rushes through the car
drying chlorine scented hair,
sun-streaked and tangled.
Making up the words as we go
we create a soundtrack
with help from the radio.
Hands tap along on window-sills,
summer-browned against dirty white duco,
as we travel home
a plume of yellow dust
following like a parade.

1100 3rd January, Goulburn pool

Blue above, blue below
(although different;
cobalt above, turquoise below)
following my rippling shadow one way,
and
(so at least I assume)
being followed by it in return
in a
(so I imagine/hope/pretend)
dignified and stately breast-stroke –
how the queen, perhaps,
would proceed down the pool.
(Although that shadow below
could well belong to a matronly bullfrog.
The queen would have had it removed).

Head above water
I can perform my maternal vigilance –
two are playing,
one is swimming towards me,
in his own variation on the Australian crawl
(“the boy is angry at the water”).

A row of ducks
(without my spectacles,
this is an educated guess)
proceeds in state along the edge.
Children, laughing, encourage them in,
but the lifeguard shoos them away,
aware,
unlike the children,
(although more likely they just don’t care)
that the reality of swimming with ducks
involves duck shit in the pool.

1300, 1st January

We have performed the last rites
on a year that had worn out its welcome:
We have cut a branch and decked it,
lit the candles and watched them burn
and given thanks that we are all still here.
We have made our offerings,
sweets for our lady of Calvary
whose help we pray we will not need.
We have observed the cleansing of the sky with fire
from a pleasant hill, once host
to untimely death – a fitting place
to end a year quartered by death.
We have scented ourselves, our home,
with sweet lavender, stolen in darkness,
to be sewn into bags with seeds
for the new year’s happier dreams.
We have cried the tears that needed to be shed
to cleanse our spirits of this cruel year
and then we have cast it out, thrown it
into the fire pit with the branch
stripped of its glitter and baubles
where it can lie disregarded, shedding its needles,
until it is nothing but a bare scaly skeleton.
And then we will watch it burn.

My Latvian grandmother once told me that on new year’s day you have to throw out the Christmas tree and then burn it, to get rid of the ghost of the old year. In Australia we can’t do that because it’s bushfire season and fires are illegal. Which is a bit of a disappointment, given what a year it’s been, dogged by deaths. But we have all our other rituals – we take several large boxes of chocolates into the Calvary ED staff in the hope we won’t see them for another year, watch the family fireworks and steal a huge bunch of lavender (from where it won’t be missed, and will be cut down in a week or so). When it dries it will be mixed with wheat and sewn into bags for winter – microwaved they provide heat and scent. And finally, on new year’s day the Christmas tree (a branch cut from the same tree every year) is stripped and thrown out the door to dry until bushfire season is over and we can burn it on the winter solstice as the older gods intended and my grandmother once observed on the other side of the world.   

2100 31st December, Mount Pleasant

impatient children
scamper about the hillside
parents sip their drinks
as the light drains from the sky
and the canvas is prepared

0500 December 30th, tachycardia

The rooster sounds reveille, but I am already awake
and swimming upwards from a dream of drowning
into bathwater-warm air, saturated with the night’s breaths.
At least in my dream the water was cool.

Sinking back, submerging again into sleep
the flickering in my chest, in my scalp, pulls me up.
Morning meds, a glance at the sky, and back to bed.
Nightmares are a side effect, supposedly,
but I long to sink back into dreams.

The rooster has woken the magpies, their songs flow –
silver streams, winding and twining through
a dawn of grey freshwater pearl,
leading me back to cool waters.