Yellow (August)

For Miss B.

Rare weekend cars in lamppost-lit side streets and four o’clock insomniacs at their frames of melancholia and the first plane coming home with Europe doing up its seatbelt for landing chance to see, at a minute’s break in dark amorphousness, the thinnest new curve of our single satellite.

The winter must be long and cold, not to mention getting to school or just getting out of bed, and the domestic duties we turn into distractions that must forestall working in the garden, before one morning stepping out and even then it’s late as eight, someone notices the native show its colour spread over every extremity of its being.

Away all day behind a moving mountain of cloud, it suddenly burnishes windows and rooftops, turns freeways into rivers of gold, about three in the afternoon; cold as the suburb may be a glow touches the eye, before new mountains of rain close it down again.

Dandenong Dutch packet bulbs did not budge last year, did not try, that ripple along the edges and waver, bow their bowls and it is the only thing when they come in sight, reminder of an England our ancestors eulogized.

Shutting down the computer and its ten thousand micro-click boxes, its cast of false selfs, a cursor here and a dozen dislikes there, is time to revisit in quiet corridor an image of rest: saint of groundedness, basis of union, it sends where it will the true self.

Head cold and throat rack and sleeplessness send him to the urine-fed tree, to pluck, even in winter, its sunshine shape, its soothing scent, its healthful bitter liquid, its astringent medicine, its vitality to the eye sockets, its straightening of the head.

Under the cone of light it spreads, every imaginable story comes to light, her adventure with dragons and his poem going through purgatory and her browse of the latest papered-over news, when otherwise the room is brown and the passages grey and outside is black as black, without a moon or stars to speak of.