Element

 

The air is cooler today, for a warm day, refreshing after the weeks of heat. Windows are wound open for movement of air through the house and we can put the hot days into memory for a while. They cool in the mind. Every window of our house is green. It was planned that way when we moved here twenty years ago. The feathery leaves of Gleditsia ripple jauntily, that survived the heat wave and then the heat wave. Twisty leaves of the cherry tree have endured more than their usual share, dropping early this year come autumn. Due to a swollen foot, I watch the action from the couch, the flowering gum at the front window, a circle of fallen red on the ground. Then return to my book, one I had forgotten I had, its Australian paper a browner shade of pale since it first saw light in 1993. Clouds have a way of being the same, but always different. This is not a paradox, it’s how clouds are. The tank in the shade of bamboo and nelly-kelly shades in turn the weigh of water, almost to the top, that skittered off the gutter chutes through last year. Quiet old rainwater, waiting heavily for the moment of release, when it will sprinkle the garden, again and again, almost like rain, making everything young. The rainwater that came in torrents, as predicted, when La Niña threw some wet ones from every corner of the South Pacific. We are all children of the same climate pattern. We gauge water levels by the greenness of the garden, water informing every leaf. Runoff rests in a large bin, too, where it descended in rushes down the spout. Now the cat is the only sound, sipping from the brim. He can do what he likes, go where he will, unlike the possums. The fire in the sky never lets up. The intensity flares and then filters, depending on planet tilt and cloud and canopy and roof. It is time for more reading in the shade of the main room, the soft side of the house, the book not so experimental as to raise the temperature. I rest my right foot on a cushion. The fires have been minimal on the east side of the continent this summer. The infernos on the west side are hard to read, memory having its lifetime load of bushfire snapshots. In the evening I may light a sandalwood stick with a match, to repel mosquitoes, and continue reading these elemental poems of Martin Johnston. The earth abides, its mass and particularity ever present underfoot. Though my foot is too sore to justify weeding or digging today. Earth, its limitless gradations of granularity tamped down gently by the feet of the creatures, reliant on its solid certainty. Tomatoes keep ripening, the artichokes need to be collected, and eccentric strawberries maintain a quiet succession of green-goes-red after the season has ended. Dry days drive us tentatively towards any screen that reports rain forecasts. The roots of everything are hanging on it.