33:54:30 S,151:6:190 E
This cul-de-sac sits like a thermometer bulb at the bottom of a street lined

with housing of various degrees–Californian bungalows, miners’ cottages

adapted to open-cut suburbia, stucco incursions that conceal grandiloquent

stairways while the next generation experiments with sheepishness.
Nearby, a distant view would have sketched calligraphic brushstrokes

in gold-clearing light, stick figures stepping on egg shells while their hands wove

jing in the bountiful void between the cresting sun and resting moon.

                                                                                                                                 South-east,

acres of bermudagrass lie still in regimented fields, while athletes, joggers
and mums in three-quarter tights pushing bivouac strollers hug the convention

of perimeter.  On weekends the fields thud and scrape with the long ball booted

forward by a thirsty fullback and sprigs that bite the turf for grip, or

the vertical alignment of a bowler in delivery stride and the deliberating willow
of a watchful batsman.

                                                      Foam-soft, low-swung play equipment breaks

the park’s sporting stranglehold and evokes hardier memories.

                                                                                                                         My thoughts

rove, like Rilke’s dog, around the corner to the off-leash strip beside the back fences

and its yap for a greater allotment.  It peters out at the slope the graders forgot
and the garden border of the Blind Centre that has toiled for decades to be

seen.  Across the road the forever “new” nursery has retained the cocky cages

and fish ponds of its predecessor, though its owners reportedly hunger

for tenements.

                                         The dog comes to heel, returns to the leash at the cyclone fencing
on the boundary of the pool that abuts the cul-de-sac.  In the civilian lane a burkini

reveals girlish joy within the strictures of her faith.   Alongside lap swimmers

ply their litanies of stroke and kick.  Those who shudder at the merest whisper

of respiting breeze seal themselves in the humidicrib of the heated pool.
I remember I first apprehended truth’s elasticity in this pool as my father cajoled

me into swimming–an Olympian propelled me to the 33 yard mark; my brothers

and sisters share this experience in their own measure–and that the coelacanth

has inhabited the deep Indian Ocean since the Devonian Era, and swims on.