Summer’s Here

Soothing sway of bamboo in the fully charged morning air … nothing moving and nothing actually still as every leaf, root and petal before me pulses, bursts and thrums to its own invisible beat and heat … 

The soft thump of Bella leaping up and in beside me on the cushion of my blue wooden garden bench, the leap, turn and snuggle against my hip one precise and perfect sequence. Instantly still, her unruly black and white fur is a mattress burst of convivial vitality. Makes me smile and draw up another promise of a grooming.

My forehead tilted and drenched in suffusing light and blue sky warmth, the tingle of my arm hairs … the irrepressible cawing of the worker blackbird, the poetic  twirruping of the yearning song thrush, the cuckoo’s dumb mating coo … all this chirruping and chattering from as many different altitudes as attitudes … some popping in for a rustling forage, before flying on to greater things and places …

The empty glass on the lime-green garden table beside me, the straight latted lines refracted into crazy zigzagged patterns … this unhurried scene incorporating everything in one steady flow, as my wandering gaze creates its own sequence and continuity, like a one-take cinematic opening shot …

Thinking now of how many hours I have spent in this same place … locked down and rooted to this garden spot, yet strangely unfettered and free to roam …

What did I say to A that time, you can be locked down in the most exotic of places, and hemmed in and harried in a tiny leafy space and yet it’s New York in your head, or anywhere your fancies take you …

That’s how it feels here, … here, but anywhere and everywhere, nowhere that i have to be …

Like this minute, I am lost in the intricate shadow play weaving in and around these pots and plants and things animate and inanimate, and there is a wine red cordyline, and its spiked fronds are the spiky fronds the Statue Of Liberty wears in her crown … can you see them?

And I hear of people travelling far now, and queues and lines in airports, and I am not envious now, as I wander the universe of my puckish mind …

And the great thing is these daft and wondrous thoughts sprout and grow and fall as freely as these leaves themselves… a silly thought as precious and as pleasurable as the deepest accidental profundity … precious coins of russet, red and infinite green … such riches.

I used to think as I put down thoughts on paper they were precious and finite, and would dry up, as leaves desiccate and wither … spent … but it’s not like that at all … trees renew and new leaves come, plentiful when bidden …

So busy yet so casually unfolding, this morning of gregarious commune and unanticipated delight and ordinary plenitude.

Oh summer, on this second day of June, you are finally here …