BLUE LAKE BEANS and others

When you look close enough,
the grevilleas are tiny puffed vulvas
with uncurling tongues poking out
from between fat, tissue-paper lips.
Pumpkins and zucchini self-seed in the compost;
like Brazilian orphans, they multiply
amidst rags of plastic and
remnants of rusted tuna can.
Today, I sit under the pussy willow
and my eyes are like honey-eaters,
the way they will not stop flitting,
sipping the juice out of the sticky cup of the day.
Lately, I’ve found myself talking to the flowers:
the tiny purple quick-wilting vetch;
talking to the verdigrised silvereyes and the wrens superb;
studying the perfect autistic blue of a forget-me-not,
its unblinking yellow eye trained on me.
And, did you know that the very tip of
the peppermint gum is a minute shepherd’s crook?
And that the first leaf of the climbing bean
bursts upward with the old husk encasing?
The quince tree makes translucent runners in the grass,
and the bulging buds of the agapanthus along the road
are nylon underpants engorged with gravel.
*
A brushtail possum can walk down the weatherboards head-first;
and young kookaburras in the silver wattles
sound empty-skulled, clacketty-headed.
Cherry trees have run amok under the bathroom floor,
and the silver-eyes have returned to the velvetted quinces.
Now, the forget-me-nots have sprouted tiny seed-purses
along their stems, like miniscule origami rosaries.
Do they enclose minute blue likenesses of The Virgin,
Her hands joined in microscopic prayer?
Digging a hole for a golden ash can make you hot,
but the hose turned upwards at your face,
slurping cold brown creek slops,
makes you even more glad.
*
It is night, and a bat whirs and stumbles helter-skelter
all the length of the house.
I encase myself in a welter of mosquito-netting
while the bat flaps and flutters
its crêpey Victorian blackness around outside.
In the morning, a scratching wakes me to the sight of a brushtail possum
balancing on the window ledge:
a tentative but determined newcomer boarding a train.
Slummacky rain puddles on top of the stove,
the dog whimpers and scratches at the door.
My bedroom is a cave of faded drapes and veils.
I speak to my workmates of the bats and possums and the scratching dog;
they stare past me, their eyes alighting, like camouflaged moths,
on the resting-stops of their prejudices.
*
Blue Lake beans are forming a clutch of lonely green hearts.
Summers ago, I eked them out:
like an opium addict, I counted the diminishing horde
day by day, foraging for sickle-shaped beanlets,
tender as paper-shelled snail spawn.
Over the grass creep old ladies’ hairnets turned vegetable,
the mesh spangled with blue spittle-drops,
like my own grandmother’s,
but these sparkles moving and becoming iridescent beetles
the colour of a strutting peacock’s bulging throat.
Another bean seedling has pushed through, uncurling,
extending a green neck, like a newborn unflexing
from the crush of its mother’s damp and binding grip.
Who knows, but that the press of soil, friable and sweet,
is not a pounding vice on the head of a Blue Lake beanstalk?
*
Arriving home each afternoon, I shuck shoes
and go for the garden hose. O benediction!
Cold water twisting, a glassy umbilical,
birthing frigid rainbows,
spattering an inky arc,
making the tough leaves of hellebores sound like vinyl,
and the flat, matte fronds of ferns, like eyelids closing.
*
Getting up to a balmy stillness-
purple sky, penstemons hanging penitent heads,
orange nasturtiums hiding under leaves that are fleshy umbrellas;
the red-hot pokers prodding themselves skyward,
the golden ash sapling self-conscious and nubile
inside a cage of wire.
And, suddenly, the morning turns-
grey clouds wrestle dumbly overhead, shouldering away the quiet.
And waves of mute raindrops, like sheaths of dusty tulle,
waft over the old vegetable garden.
Now, tucked up alone in a blue-and-white bed
with a cup of Earl Grey tea,
I recall the primal pleasure of rain on a roof;
and then a memory that always comes:
stale Christmas peanuts, an abandoned black car
overlooking a steel-blue lake, a tangle of periwinkle,
upward-creeping raindrops on the windscreen.
Rain on the roof. Blue and white cotton.
Rain on the roof.
Come and give me a kiss, he says.
He is lying in his bed in the lean-to:
a man with bluish face whiskers.
Nicknamed Boofhead, and not all there.
He holds me still and grazes my face, open-mouthed,
slobbering all over my freckled face,
smearing spit, his hands in my Sunlight soap hair,
until my mother walks in.
Hard rain on the roof. Clean blue and white cotton.
Rain on the roof.