Couple
of nylon rakes, a straw broom
You would not call us gardeners, and
this is not a garden but a tan parterre,
an eighty-metre length of granite sand
with eight grand planes, left to spread for years,
trees, you might say, from another realm,
stretching to my window on the sixth.
Bruce is 79 and I just caught him up,
and Warren is well into his magic eighties,
which we all agree entitles him to lead.
(Sometimes you drive two hundred miles and
the fuel gauge does not think of budging—
you must be powered by a magic drop of fuel,
that lasts for ever, or seems to, while it lasts.)
We rake and Warren sweeps the
pavement.
Passing neighbours are reminded of Japan,
but Bruce and I think ourselves to Paris
where we make the Tuileries look smart
and smoke imaginary Gauloises.
I think of Jackson Pollock as we work,
how he left the fall of paint to chance.
Our rake strokes, directed only by the task,
gathering leaves and twigs and bark,
create an unpremeditated patterning,
tight grooves in many overlapped directions,
pleasing to both raker and beholder.
The thought could trick you to try for beauty,
so, I say nothing of the thought to Bruce.
Also, I think of Evan Jones's poem
of raking in the early Canberra winter,
the pile of leaves, 'a slow moist fire',
emblem of the garden's and the poet's past.
Not gardening, but cultivating
something,
a kempt look, tended, a parchment erased
to be re-writ by prams, removalists and bikes,
who begin before we have properly ended.
Soon leaves in millions will let
themselves go,
our green waste bags will plump with dead.
Endless cycle. We do not talk of endings.
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