Diary Entries

COCKATOOS Perched comfortably up there in the penthouse of our skyscraper gums, a white cockie selects a spray of leaves, nibbles into the gumnuts and then simply drops it all. ‘Vandals,’ fumes the Tidy Gardener, shaking his rake at the flock and those hovering brush turkeys. I pick up a gumnut. Less than a centimetre wide, when dried and up-ended, out falls a pinch of seeds the size of a full stop. While I think about the size difference between seed and tree, an unseen larrikin drops single gumnuts that seem to target my head and shoulders. Hard hat, anyone?

CORONAVIRUS BAG PART TWO ‘They said they thought it wasn’t safe!’ my husband told me, and I blenched. Me, unclean? Me, carrying the virus? I hadn’t just returned, not taken That Cruise, How could they think–but it’s just asthma! Suddenly I knew how Typhoid Mary felt. Suspicion made me a danger even at home. In upset and dismay, my eye fell on my cheery yellow bag, lying on its innocent side there by the pool. And one repeated motif struck me now: with the force of a blow: a nimbus of spikes about a central core, with droplets on each spike. This pretty drawing now seemed ominous, as if my bag had marked me out. ‘J’accuse!’ it whispered loudly. And suddenly the sunshine felt too bright, the shadows darkened and leant forward to remind me that I was mortal too, quite as much as the ants I nudge aside or carelessly flush down the drain when they find the pantry honey again. It’s taken time for me to learn to like my yellow bag once more. It’s still the same, most useful in the rain to guard my goods from dangerous drops. But I never see it now without a glance to check the corona-shapes have not somehow multiplied or morphed unseen by me into the pretty killers striding through our human world creating such a panic, striking such terror that wolves come forth and howl in our streets again.

CORONAVIRUS BAG (PART I) My woven plastic bag was an impulse buy last year in Europe– how fairy-tale exotic that sounds in these lockdown times. Bright yellow, decorated with cheerful graphic flowers, birds and insects– and the logo, of course, written in French, the clincher for me to buy. Just a euro or two–why not, Madame? And sturdy strappy handles. Yep. Back home it soon became a useful souvenir, carrying the phones and water bottle round the garden, sitting on the pool edge; indispensable, really. Then my bag seemed incongruous as the bushfire summer unfolded in all its apocalyptic horror, though it shielded phones and shucked off clothes from several downpours which fingered their wet way inside what now seemed a fragile home. We joined the insurance phone queue. Now the dragon-mouthed winds from round the globe brought not red dust and burnt leaves from our country’s heart but the silent covid killer floating from the breath of– who knows who? Obediently we began withdrawing from those we loved and those we hardly knew. But finally came the phone call to tell us an assessor would come to pronounce upon our growing patches of mould growing more florid by the day above our dining table. At last! I thought as I opened the door one morning to burly strangers in hi-vis jackets. And then I paused and sneezed. And sneezed again. ‘Hay fever!’ I choked out between the spasms. ‘Asthma. All this mould!’ My eyes were streaming. In retrospect, I’d have done the same. As soon as my husband came to squire them round and I escaped outside for my morning swim, I heard their truck start up and off they sped.

WRITING POEMS [PART 2] But once let loose the poetic urge, the poem struggles to be born so you sit and sigh, and tug your hair, search for the word you want, clench your hands in frustration, maybe even give up. Sorry. Not every poem breathes. But often poems just arrive, announcing what they want and trailing, tailing away like a half-glimpsed comet– was it really ever there? Or swerving through your mind to snatch an image here, a perfumed memory there. And sometimes just words arrive bubbling, pushing, gushing, tumbling, flowing down my body in the shower– catch them before they’re swirling down the drain! A poem grows by itself, demands its space, its time, so you must dig and scribble-scrabble, listen to its rhythm, find its shape. And when a poem’s done, that’s it. A final image, a last line, ‘I’m done,’ it says, and turns around like a satisfied cat; curls up, finally out of the mind, scratched on the page for good or ill, and dreams there of waking to leap into another mind to purr and fan its whiskers out in sympathetic ecstasy.

WRITING POEMS [PART I] At this time what I write comes out as poetry. I sigh. It’s hard work: more dense than prose, clotted often, or shy to venture forth. We speak in prose; it flows and swirls and spreads in a river leading to the sea of human life, breeding volumes of fiction, series, vasty worlds in space, distinguished non-fiction tomes, and the impressive cathedral of the Oxford Dictionary that consumed its creators’ lives. Poems? Different beasts. They tempt you with their brevity. Just an image, they whisper, I won’t take long, I swear. So open your eyes, enjoy your life, or close your eyes and listen; let your imagination swirl. An invisible smell twitches your nose; an itch begs to be scratched. You can ignore the poetic urge. Poems are often shy, and drift away. Doesn’t matter, they mutter, shrug and dissolve like ghosts in the sun, unloved and thus unborn. Or the cat demands her food; there’s the supermarket run; a loved one’s friendly question and the poem’s vanished like a chirruping bird hidden in the shivering undergrowth that’s still now. The poem-bird has flown, gone, irrevocably lost.

AUTUMN Suddenly our world turns from summery greens under blue skies to sprays of yellow, flares of red under a menacing dome of stormy grey and white. In a neighbouring garden, an entire waterfall of blazing orange leaves is poised to fall, leaf by leaf in slow motion, from a Japanese maple. The trees withdraw their magic green from all those finger-leaves which craft the sunshine into juicy sugars which eventually feed the entire world. Those trees whose leaves will drop begin to break their chlorophyll down to its separate parts. They pull the fragments back inside, storing them in a living skeleton: stems and branches, trunks and roots, to wait through the winter, dormant. When their chlorophyll’s dismantled, the other pigments in leaves reveal their flaming orange, brilliant yellow. Other compounds are brewed anew to create the deeper hues of scarlet and purple. So this season strides our world in its royal leafy robes, billowing in the winds of change. Each leaf’s a patterned fragment of the warm cloak wrapped around the future’s sleeping seeds, till spring kisses them awake.

OUR ELKHORNS Suddenly they were there, tiny plants clinging to a rocky bank at the edge of the bush. Cute pale green shield-shaped plates with a few green leaves hopefully held aloft. I watered them occasionally, wished them well. Then drought bit. We had more to worry about than self-seeded ferns. They clung to life, most of them as the sandy soil baked in the sun. Now, two years later, seven still survive, plump and flourishing in the recent rain. They seem to live on air… Four have moulded themselves around the rock their spore fell on and germinated, small or large, cube-shaped or round. One has piggybacked on a brother fern, Clinging to its lower edge. Another has wound itself between a rock and the root of a nearby tree, filling the space between, a perfect adaptation, like the elegant limbs of a soaring dancer caught by a photo. And the last elkhorn has spread its shield around a root that loops complete in air. There it clings, at ease as a highwire artist seated on a lofty trapeze, gauzy skirt flowing as she defies gravity. Yet this small plant is of the earth, near the earth, clinging tight, sucking nutrition from the air and transforming sunlight into living, breathing indomitable leaves.

WHAT BIRD IS THAT? (Australian edition) Strange multi-coloured birds dance on our clothesline. A purple Jumper fluffs its feathers, a flock of Orange-spotted Black Socks ripples in rhythmic unison and a breeze lifts the rounded belly of a Greater Turquoise Towel about to push down those massive wings to launch its heavy bulk and soar off on the air currents. Dry yet? Nope; the scudding clouds still sprinkle our strange birds sporadically with raindrops. No matter. Think I’ll let the joyous inhabitants of our extraordinary aviary enjoy their time outside.

FINISHING THE PRUNING The old rosemary bush is lighter now. I scan it to check for spindly twigs that have escaped my stern and sculpting secateurs. Nip. Snip. Oops! A little twig holds up a spray of needle-leaves and a pale blue flower or two. They gaze at me accusingly. I decide on rosemary-scented dinner. Again? sighs the long-suffering bush. Now before I snip a twig I use my eye to follow carefully each gnarly branch through the interlacing loops of down and up and round and through it’s danced to find its space and share of sun and light and warmth to magic the miracle of flowers. I trace the years of slo-mo dancing this multi-limbed and ordinary bush has performed while we have lived our human lives at different speeds beside it. Bonsai now seems to me just a still photo taken from the long and subtle dance of life that plant and sun and time perform each day they live, unseen by human eyes. How elephantine slow we must seem to flitting humming-birds and insects on their single day’s life of mating and dancing in the sun.

ISO-GARDENING [PART 2] Snip, snip at the rosemary with the slightly blunted secateurs– sharpening’s another item to add to that lengthening list. Dead twigs of rosemary mingle with hopeful bursts of green, blue flowers still a-bud. Its perfume’s given us many a fragrant roast, many a wake-up tea. It’s been picked for hasty posies, and always, always means remembrance. My parents hover behind one shoulder, Ophelia trails her sighs behind the other. There. Our woody rosemary’s lighter now. I sit at a bench to refine the cuttings: these to strip and dry the leaves for cooking, those for a posy that might grow roots for striking, these splendid ones to strike in soil today. Out of the lopping, I reassure the parent plant, will come new plants. Life will go on. And a sudden gust of autumn wind sweeps my hopeful piles to the ground. I pick them up again. No use moaning. The cuttings and I regard each other for a moment. Yep, I tell them silently. We’re all in this together. The old bush regards me with a tolerant eye. We’ll see, it seems to say. We’ll see. My phone alarm nudges me towards my writing desk. Oh yes, we’ll see. Together.