Autumn Ramblings

It's the last day of autumn, here. We walk to the shops.

We cross Portrush Road and walk down Percival Street, past the hole in the ground that was once Clayton Aged Care Home. The street trees are not very old. Under them, on the footpath, are shiny red ovate leaves that look like they've been punched out of leather. Some have bright yellow edges, others have startling green veins.

It irritates me that I don't know the name of these trees. That won't stop me from calling them Manchurian Pear. Because that's what I think they are, and I have my reasons.

Now we have turned the corner on to Queen Street. It's quite dark, for two thirty in the afternoon. That's because the street is lined with huge plane trees. At least I think they are plane trees, and I have my reasons. The footpath is littered with fallen plane tree leaves, as big as poppadoms, and as crunchy. The colour of these is ordinary dead leaf brown, but that is something that happens to them after they have fallen off the plane trees.

On the trees, the leaves are a different brown entirely. The glowing brown of rust, the curdling brown of yellow and the fading brown of green. The colour of snakes, the colour of something being not quite right with your eyes, the colour of menace.

Fortunately, we soon cross this street into Wall Street.

Mysterious Encounter - Part 2

Read me the second poem, says Pliny the Elder. I am all ears.

Alright. I say. It's called "Sequel". And listen out for the interesting rhyme scheme.

I turn the page, and begin to read:

Sequel.

I think I know now what that vision meant,
The old man last night, stooped and bent,
His Toby dog, their singular intent,
Looking for clues in dead leaves as they went
Unseeing us.

It was an intimation of a lagging universe
In parallel with ours, behind, but nothing worse.
Was he the shade of Sherlock Holmes living out the curse
Of the evil Professor Moriarty, or the reverse,
Whatever that might be?

Yes I know that Holmes and Moriarty fell in thrall
Locked in murderous embrace down Reichenbach fall.
But what was it that prompted me to call
His dog Toby when I didn't know at all
That was his name?

Whose name? scoffs Pliny.

Sherlock Holmes' dog of course.

So you heard the old man call his dog Toby?

No. I described the dog as a Toby dog in "Dog", before I knew it was the name of Sherlock Holmes' dog. A coincidence too unlikely to ignore.

How is it that you knew about Professor Moriarty and the Reichenbach falls, but you didn't know
that Holmes' dog was called Toby?

How is it that you are being so irritating? Anyone would think that you were Sherlock Holmes himself. If you must know, I did some research after I got home.

And then you made the whole thing up, about who he was.

Yes, at this stage I suppose you could say so. But you have not heard poem number three, where I see him again, and he sees me.

Mysterious Encounter - Part 1

You met Sherlock Holmes! says Pliny the Elder. Impossible!

Not impossible, I say, staring hard at him. I'm almost one hundred per cent sure it was him.

Almost! says Pliny.

Well he was very old, but let me tell you how it happened and how I became convinced he was Sherlock Holmes.

I'm listening, says Pliny.

First I must go and find the book of poems that I wrote ten years ago, because that is where the encounter is recorded, I tell him.

I go away. I return with an old stained brown-paper-covered exercise book. I open the book.

Here we are, I say. Written on the thirteenth of June, in the year 2000. It's called "Dog". I called it "Dog", because at the time I wrote this poem I was unaware of the identity of the old man.

Read it to me, says Pliny.

I read:

Dog
A bent old man with a Toby dog
On a cold frosty night walk
Shuffles slowly, feeling the path with a stick,
Shepherding the dog through the dead leaves.
We pass him; and do not talk;
I perform an oblique stare.
If he looks at me I'll say.....
I'll say Good evening, and smile.
He looks down at his dog, all the while
Of our passing
And I look away.

That, says Pliny, doesn't prove anything. And it isn't even very good.

Wait, Pliny, I say. It is only part one of three. I see him again. As for your saying that it isn't any good, I think you may well change your mind.

The salamander, the axolotl and the skink

What is a salamander? I asked myself. It occurred to me it might be something like an axolotl. I had no faith in this though, for most times I have thought something could be like an axolotl, it's turned out that it wasn't.

But an axolotl is a type of salamander, so I was right for once.

The fire salamander has golden stars all down its back.

I am reminded of the beautiful but lethargic skink that spent last Wednesday, and until Thursday afternoon, resting on the paving bricks outside our back door. She had orange markings down her back, looking something like a zipper. The markings were wider at the level of her back legs, and tapered to quite small at the end of her tail. Her eye glinted like the head of a pin.

She was seven bricks out from the back door, seven bricks in from the wall. That is, about a metre out from the corner where the door meets the wall. Her tail was slotted neatly into a groove between two bricks. Her head was at 5 minutes to the groove. During the course of her stay, her head moved to 10 minutes, then 13 minutes to the groove, but other than this she did not budge.

I became quite solicitous of her, stepping softly, asking her questions, waving my finger in front of her head. I told her I believed she might be dead.

On Thursday she disappeared. I'm still watching, but all I see are dead leaves, that look like her.