The Upside-down Sweetness Inside

Five o’clock morning rain,
a kookaburra watches me from the cherry tree;
birds coming to market,
pedaling their squeaky wheels like crazy,
pedaling their rained-on wares.
“Here’s a beau-u-uty!” one of them calls,
holding up the morning like a Chinese peasant
displaying an orange-feathered duck.
The kookaburra scoots a monorail arc
from cherry tree to blackwood,
its wings pumping corduroy air.
The longer I live in this place,
the more I see it:
the dead branches of a wattle
fuzzed in luminous green winding-sheets;
the dark and private places at the undersides of blackwoods;
the silkiness of rye-grass heads drooping purple in the rain;
the native grass along the fenceline yellowed,
as though pissed upon.
The longer I live here, the more I smell
the fresh neck-sweet loveliness:
the faint resin of Adventure Bay pine;
the homely motherliness of the rain,
drowsy and lethargic,
splatting a blue milkiness on the grass,
splotching a lazy fattiness on the verandah roof.
A lone red-hot poker nods by the edge of the floorboards;
suddenly, a tiny honeyeater alights
to prod at the upside-down sweetness up inside.
Just as precipitously, it whirs away,
leaving the flower standing,
a shaggy plastic toy beacon
in the underwater, five o’clock gloom.