Carol Jenkins

Night gardening, mauve and mutable

One am, an alcove opens to show a back lit slipper orchid,
then closes. The orchid had slipped off eleven years before.

The sweet pea seeds that did not make their planting
date with Saint Pat’s, bloom midwinter in the sofa divots

while a startling halo of cherry blossom grows
on my head the night I came back from Bundanon.

I expect the ferns will not block the lower steps,
but that is their day job, they’re only neat by night.

At two am I set to with a spade and plant an acreage
of asphodel in a corner of the garden that day will not reveal.

Night root stocks are pure graft, the peach tree fields cherry pits
inside a plum dark flesh, the scent is apricot, like it too forgets.

The jacaranda blossoms give proof of coloured dreams, like a note
written in early sleep, here, take this as evidence.

The day time trees I planted, the lemon gum in Darlinghurst,
a winter crop of angophoras at Crafers, do I appear in their dreams,

trailing clods of dirt, leaving the scent of sweat from a damp
and dirty shirt and broken vanes of windmill grass?

Four Capital City Forecasts

Moistly sunny, thatchy patches in the early west
tending towards chance in the north, partly
showered with early mornings. Light clearing

in the evening. Isolated afternoons, partly partly,
clouds becoming eggy, a dance of fog tending
northwest, mostly days, some nights at 15–25 kph.

Summary warnings, fresh at times, chance
of southern suburbs, slow moving Thursdays
with frost around 100 knots. Light words easing.