loaded smells: mulch

garden mulch is a smell on

which I drank myself

into adulthood –

and when I’m old and the

only ellipsis left

is that of the great perhaps it

will blow towards me in

a squall of memory, the scent

of the saturday trips

to the warrandyte nursery,

the fig tarts we ate there,

the christmas trees we

had chopped down and loaded,

the mulch hillocks

I could have ran up and down forever –

whole decades will have vanished

by then – fettered as I am by this

nembutal imperative – fettered

but fearless – I can watch

the umbrella of a  water fountain crown

and land like the sound of babies

treading water, float tranquilly down to

the cavernous pits of my remembrance –

I can like it there. So when the dump truck

bucks a mulch mound into the centre

of royal park, I imbibe it as if I’m about

to be submerged, knowing

I’ve a few more gulps of that woody elixir

left before my long hair turns white.