daylight spending

... always upsets me. Then I feel foolish. Nothing has changed, except the clock. But I am thrown. So, this morning, after a brief night of cartoonish dreams, I wake at 4 a.m. and stumble out on to the balcony. Why not? ... light up a Gadang Garam, go to the far end to look into the east. There, above the murk, hangs a silver crescent moon, larger than I have ever seen it. Dark city of dreams, almost purple ... I recall, the phrase is Robin Hyde's. 1926, as she came in to Sydney off a ship from Auckland. I look into the west and there is Mars setting, so big it seems almost like that picture in the post previous but one to this. I can see the cracks and don't for a moment suppose they are canals. They are clearly scars, probably tectonic. Something strange is happening to the atmos, it is as if it is swallowing the red planet. Oh, well, let it. In my confusion I think the moon is also setting but of course it's rising. The sun will eat its borrowed light soon enough. Already the currawongs are yodelling. And the koels koelling. The apocalyptic can only be faced down by the domestic, so I go and put the kettle on. A cup or three of lapsang souchong will probably sort me out. When I go back out I see the jacarandas, flowering as they are, emerging from that purple darkness. Umbelliferous. They are globes themselves, or half globes, clouds of a lighter purple breathed out of the gloom like membranes. Why do birdcalls at dawn evoke the ancient of days? Guess it's because it's always the first time for them. And for once, and again, for me. Whoops, there's the kettle singing ... I go back to bed and read for an hour, Peter Russell's Prince Henry 'The Navigator' A Life. But I don't forget that vision ... palm trees rising up like the frigid stalks of fountains, and houses down to the water's edge; no wildness, no great bare tawny patches or hills like the flukes of sea-monsters ... houses and purple dark ...