Gritty realism playing solo fruit box bongo

on flagstone stairs and heavy awnings
reduces the morning to a wet/dry sequence

cosying in doorways, dot-dot-dashing under
drooping canopies of parasols flanked with

oversaturated slashes of synthetic pelt.
Concessionaires in their snug shops concede

little too late to the ocean’s Aeolian bite
pricing their oblations of Uggs, felt mittens

and umbrellas on airlocked mantels as if
the townsfolk aren’t already Patty Hearsts

to the Symbionese cold front storming in.
For a spell our shelter’s a seven-dimensional

cinema’s foyer. A nature doco’s trailer loops.
Possibly apocryphally the director’s family

brought the first Italian bees here their first
giddy sips of Eucryphia lucida (leatherwood)

an understory dweller who — as it transpires —
revels in rain, whose pollen acts presumably

as the niggling pearl of pre-precipitation
in at least one finger of the tumbling nectar

the bumblebees on the foyer’s flatscreen
swim in hyper definition through sunbeams

and gently rising mist at all costs to avoid.