The Forest Under the Trees

Around and about and under, this moss patch I found near the Franklin River- that is the famous FRanklin in Tasmania, is a lovely thickets of , well flowering sporangia is not right, perhaps ‘Sporangiuming’ sporangia might apply? This miniature foresetof alert and ready to catapult moss sporangia makes a fine green shade,  for the maybe tardegradia ?  Roethke writes of gathering moss to line cemetery baskets, and feels mean for disinterring it.  Yes, it is better left to the forest, micro-fields for water bears, deft cold beds and hyrdoscopic flingers of  moss gametes. 
 

A Horse is a Horse Of Course Off Course

 There is no neigh-saying, the horse was the golden means of transport for nearly every century before the invention of the bicycle. Here is a clear and blue sky celebration of the golden stead in its natural element azure.  Let there be no Im Pediment to the curlicue destiny of riders and whatever that other aquatic substrate that makes up this precarious tableau. 

The Frog Prince’s Aquatic Gusher and a Petulant Pigeon Princess

 Some matches are made of pasta - as autocorrect would have it - and some, like these, are more flowing.  The Frog’s exuberant discourse, not to be underrated just because it is water, and really, and here I may have been reading too much Jose Saramago, though that expression is paradoxical as how can one read too much Saramago, and water while not signifying words, most definitely has meaning and content, and - leaving aside the circularity of the fountain in which these two are found, is most probably never the same stream twice, and so I think the pigeon, who is now long gone, and the frog, make up a kind of haiku:

Spring springs white,

  The  frog’s green glaze,

Hastens the dove’s flight. 

Oceano Atlantico - Why the Portuguese Invented Saudade

 Coming along the edge of the Douro River in Oporto, where it meets the Atlantic, the ocean is a tumult of mood and grey-green flux, the sand needs grit to stay where it is, and life-saving rings are so large as to nearly by boats. Nobody was swimming.   Contemplating this coast  explains the Portuguese had to invent the melancholy antidote of saudade.  

A Message from a Broken Bottle

The sea glass tide delivers up, a mosaic of sand smoothed parts, like a pledge not to drink to much, the sea recycles glass to sand,, aggregate and  shards of old habits, that memory can reassemble. 
 

Stepping into Same Creek Thrice

There are perfect beaches and then there are perfect swimming holes, and this creek, with its lovely run of cascades and small pools, with its opportunities to study sundews in crevasses, and nascent ferns, all while idling in clear sweet water,  dangling one’s foot in a roil of white water, or in the pool swimming against the current - all culminate in one clear answer : this is a perfect swimming hole, courtesy of the dry season is Litchfield National Park in the Northern Territory. 

 

Parsing the Persimmon Tomato Colour Chord

 To some dishes - the joke -What did one grave say to the other? A: That looks good in you.- apply, everything looks good in this vintage Shelley lettuce dish, and here a case in point, a perfect colour chord orange and red, is chromatically delicious. There is nothing parsimonious about persimoning. 

Dear Diary - What is the Comma-tion About?

Yes, for those of you who have wrangled with errant ‘em-dashes, inserted apostrophe’s or deleted them for text not your own, this is the definite grammarian’s poetic license,  it is, in fact, a. Comma-tion, and this is so upbeat people have been seen dancing to it. Get yours from Ginnindera Press , unless your initials are IP in which case yours, as they say about the cheque, is in the mail. 

Farewell to Autumn - A Spoon and Maple Story

Autumn is over, all its red-brown leaves have gone to ground, as old spoons know each season has its measure,  as each patterned handle, each scoop gathers its patina of verdigris and oxidants. 
 

Clouded Skies: Rescaling North Head

 Sydney Harbour’s North Head is always worth contemplating from any distance, the sandstone cliff faces are chameleons in the changing late afternoon light, and mostly upstage both Middle Head and the sky, but this  late autumn afternoon cloudscape, with its impossible volume of cold grey cumulus under a vast acreage of pink-mauve tinted stratus, seems to the kind of brinkmanship of scale that  outdoes everything else in sight, that Goethe’s adage that the sky offers the one perfect view, seems perfectly apt. 

Cold Times and Everyday Ambiguity

 There must be limits to insult even for inanimate objects, and I find no reason one should  boast about being rude to Ice,  yes, it it cold, and lacking in conversation, but for summer drinks, cold compresses and something to rattle in a glass, ice is hard to surpass. Vain boasting of this kind can’t last. 

Crow Bones and Green Grass - A Whitmanesque Curiosity

Crows have been dropping clean-picked bones into my garden. Spying this possibly macabre undoing of the buried, naturally brings to mind Walt Whatman’s Leaves of Grass.  While it’s unlikely the earth has extruded what seems to be a duck femur,  the ground is supersaturated and seven eighths  mud after so many weeks of rain, anything, bone or water is unlikely to be swallowed up. Did the crow drop it from the jacaranda tree directly above, or let it fall while winging past? Is this speculation pure idleness or a bona fide interest in avian habits?  

A Glass of Clear Light Please

 A cocktail of wood grain and shadow, what better beverage for a little after midday - as the fall of light here reveals, than a patterned glass of clear light, in its wavering partnership with the cutting board’s plain surface. 

Blue Hills - Bart Brassica’s Alternative Italian Travel Scheme

 Bart has been thinking of ways to break into Agri-tourism, and has fancied Lambertville as a kind of Faux  Firenze - though how the Delaware and the Arno might be confused relies entirely on Bart not having ever been further than Swedesboro New Jersey, just once  and at the time he was packed, he says by a mistake of scale, into a box of Fancy Medium Peaches - and he woke up in what he claims was an Alliterative Universe, that was exactly like Tusuncanny,  which has given him a deep insight in the The Tusuncanny Lambscape - and this (yes, this is long-winded) was the inspiration for his Blue Hills mural, which will surely bring in all those that fancy a trip to Italian but don’t own a passport.  

A Bird in The Foot is Worth Two on the Barn

Bart Brassica, always one to take advantage of any proverbial good fortune has been trying to attract song birds to Brass Acres for some time, and has found the Big Foot has been adopted as a nest, or perhaps a rest in place for this Blue-Eyed Tin Warblette. Bart is aware that, as a rule, Tin Warblettes,  rarely sing but might twang if they get motivated, but one thing Bart is sure of, is that is a Bird in the Foot must have a market value of twice any other bird. This is the footprint for Bart’s economic step forward. 
 

Apple of My Eye Level

 

 Bart Brassica’s farming ethos has long been Crops One Can Look Up To, and here he has applied himself to good effect with what he calls  his Apple of My Eye Level -  an Appellation for which he has applied for a Pattern Ending, Mavis Eggwhistle has said, tartly, that Bart has designs on himself, which he takes as a compliment.   Now Bart is waiting for the Apple Pie Orders to roll in. 

home town rainbow, home town rain

                               hometown rainbow,  hometown rain

                hometown brings the sky down

                                ian arc of harbour,  in a play of last light

                city rain squall rolling in from the south-east

                                that low pressure system, in falling light    

                piles  of pink and orange cloud

                                                a single plane, lit silver inside

                a hometown rainbow, flying into hometown rain 

                                      

Long On Longan, Line Times

 Three times longan, on a blue and white plate, a faint reflection of the underside of the light overhead, the dining table as always  hospitable to all plates, all fruit, all thing blue and white. 

Dividing Light - Night Owl Therapy

 Bart Brassica has been toying with the idea that light, properly managed be a cure for those waylaid in the particularly slough of despondency induced by climate change, and while he has installed solar panels in his hat (out of view here) to do his bit for enlightenment, here is taking up Dividing Light-Night Owl Therapy, to improve his mood, his sleep and his complexion.  Mavis Eggwhistle has pointed out that his is a Barn Owl, but Bart is just miffed, having misheard this as Banal.  

The Barn Owl, as we can see by his look, is over the Rainbow bathing. 

Heedlessly Hot Headed Hat Project for Bart Brassica

 Subscribing to the  old adage - if you want to get ahead get a hat, Bart has been cultivating Habaneros, due to mishearing Habenero as Hat’n Eros and believing there was a gap in Huntingdon County’s winter market for Heated Headwear he has raised a  hot crop of Habaneros.  

Mavis Eggwhistle has warned him he is courting disaster if he pulls a peck of peppers like these over his peepers but Bart, as we know, is impervious to most forms of common sense, and has told Mavis, thinking any courting is better than none, that his line of Hot Hat are full steam ahead. Next up Scotch Bonnets. 

Super Foods - Fennel-culi and Fennel-cula

 Some years back Bart Brassica did some interesting work on Crop Triangles, by crossing corn with Marzipan, though later Granny Egg called in the FBI considering what she called Marxipan was a danger to voters everywhere. Unfettered, Bart always on the look out for a new super food to flog on Farmgate Fridays, has been experimenting with two varieties of Giant Marzipanised Fennel, and finding no enthusiasm to  the more obvious nomenclatures  Fennel-Pan or Marzi-Fenn, has hit upon calling them  Fennel-culi and Fennel-cula, claiming these names are more tuneful, important for the Singing Sales Pitch traditional to Farmgate Friday.  Bart can’t carry a tune in a bucket, he is hoping that one of the Farmhands, all of whom he has called in to audition, will have some tenor-acity. In case they don’t show up he was bugged the Farmhands quarters to get the inside running. 

Sleep, Quite the Universal Panacea

Sleep, like peace and quiet can be quite elusive, and on spelling, far be it for me, a known sloppy speller,  to cast the first nasturtium, and who is to say that a full stop should not take a nap mid-sentence, and given  that  the link between  upper case and en-titlement is well established, and there being not doubt that at any given moment people right across the planet packing in the zeds, and the endearing slight wobble that offsets the sure and decisive lettering of this directive, of  all of this it must be said, albeit quietly so as not to disturb anyone dozing, that this notice is a true piece of vernacular art. Quite. 

Western Set Theory - Bart Brassica’s Cinematic Solace

Of late Bart Brassica has been in an self-imposed Insulation on his farm, but whether it is the dusting of ergotamine mould in his rye crop or the effects of too much of his own company, Bart has been having flashbacks or flash forwards- that he is starring in a tumble-weed Western set,  and, bicyclist notwithstanding, all the world is an empty stage coach, to paraphrase John Wayne in a Shakespearean moment. 

While Bart loves Tin Pan Alley and it’s glitter of late his has had an odd feeling the he is both Country and Western. Granny Egg who has serendipitously taken this photo with her Mail Order Drone - claiming this is the apotheosis of neighbourhood watching, is similarly convinced that Bart is now Sheriff of Brass Acres, but that might have something to do her breakfast of rye flapjacks from grain she borrowed from Bart last week. 

Insect Artefacts - The Leaf Edited to Arabesque

 

Lazing in the garden, reading, this incised leaf, floats down on to my book.  It signals an insect with a stylish bite, a sense of curve and arabesque.  Senescence has its own coloured bravado here improved by insect artisanship.