Summertime Blues

Boxing Day

The history of art is littered with bodies. Bill Viola

Two species of cicada are singing an octave apart

a violin and cello waiting for the quavers, the bulbuls’

liquid piano in the higher registers. A garden

is an opportunity for aesthetics but with responsibilities.

Pale gossamer wings blue-white-green blur in a web,

the obese owner is resting up in the daylight hidden

in the Spanish moss on the yellow bloodwood’s bark.

I free the Praying Mantisis who is reluctant to leave my hand,

then film the compost's pink defenceless litter.

I don’t press record as they tumble in slow motion

to the bottom of the bucket, a surreal scene of enduring release,

one Viola might replicate

using humans numinous in the fall of immortality

carefully lit, the composition immaculate. A couple kick,

learning to swim too late, the poem looks away.

We pull up a chair each to watch a lizard on one end

of a long birds nest frond, a rusty coloured netcaster

hangs above the other end waiting, white dots of excreta

mark the target on the shiny green leaf, her net neatly woven

waits between her legs, Bron slaps a mossie against her thigh

distracting me and starting the skink running down the leaf

and – snap, in an eyelid's reflex eye the spider had launched its net

capturing the skink by its back legs, I run inside, get the camera

and wait to see what will happen writing - the reptile writhing, or something like that .