The Red Gum

The Red Gum

The Red Gum

A camera could catch it.  Or a video.  A painter can’t.    
It’s October’s first dry wind, blowing in across the Harbour.
Rousing, irritable wind, with the feel of flat country out west,
it thrashes the red gum with its tentacle flowers, it blood-red new leaves,
whose images will never be finished, never held, even
by the best of visualists.  The reds of this red tree
dazzle and blur, both cochineal and stain of flying-ants.

I’m stuck with this red tree.  These blue waters.  Everything’s primary.  
Gusts and gusts of invisible wind shake the branches
into horse-heads neighing and rearing into shoals of silver -
let loose, they’re mares floury with dusty evening light
under trees, in a paddock, back of the mind.  Spring wind blasts them,
turns them back to main-street bunting rattling, triangular, overhead.
It crackles the leaves like a fire that’s burning up too fast, too dry.
Against grey-blue water, the red gum’s sinewy branches shine.
Behind it, yacht masts and yellow water taxis cutting their wakes.
Across the bay, particles of cars glide by, silent as a museum’s dust.

I make coffee, think of the washing.  I’ll spend the day looking at pictures:
slides of someone’s work. There’ll be lunch, maybe an hour at the pool.
All the while, the red tree flickers and threshes, an image from a shaky aerial.
Against the blue, its curtain’s like a crimson smear, a fishing-net of shadows.
All morning the flat is full of slanting diamond light and sun,
probing, like a philosopher, this side and that.  A wall, a bit
of floor, a bookshelf: and, then, again the tree,
like a gigantic window-cleaner, looming at the window.  No Oak
of Dodona, its variable upsets pure prophecy.  Its clouds glitter,
promising richness, quite other than a tranquil view
taken in across the land: a prospect of water-meadows,
a few cows.  Or a portrait with brilliant drapery.   Who was it
said the wind is “boneless?”  This ghost’s rattling its maraca,
making words impossible.  For all the time, this storm-tossed red gum
burns its way into the mind, under thought and reference,
like a premonition you can’t tease out:
its own forest of sun-lit fire, taking over everything around it,
whether neighbouring roofs, or the gulls battling to the Heads,
with rain-storms of flowers hanging out, dryly, for heat and bees.
Just for a second, it’s static under cloudless light, golden as a haystack.