Water-gardening In An Old Farm Dam

Blueing the blackened water that I'm widening with my spade as I lever up water tussocks and chuck them ashore like sopping comets is a sun-point, dazzling heatless acetylene, under tadpoles that swarm wobbling, like a species of flies and buzzing bubbles that speed upward like many winged species. Unwettable green tacos are lotus leaves. Waterlily leaves are notches plaques of the water. Their tubers resemble charred monstera trunks. Some I planted, some I let float. And I bought thumb-sized mosquito-eating fish for a dollar in a plastic amnion. ‚Wilderness‘ says we've lost belief in human building: our dominance now so complete that we hide from it. Where, with my levered back, I stand, too late in life, in a populous amber, feet deep in digesting chyle over clays, I love green humanised water in old brick pounds, water carried unleaking for miles around contour, or built out into, or overstepping stonework in long frilled excess. The hands‘ pride and abysmal pay that such labour earned, as against the necks and billions paid for Nature. But the workers and the need are gone, without reaching here: this was never canal country. It's cow-ceramic, softened at rain times, where the kookaburra's laugh is like angles of a scrubbing toothbrush heard through the bones of the head. Level water should turn out of sight, on round a bend, behind an island, in windings of possibility, not be exhausted in one gesture, like an avenue. It shouldn't be surveyable in one look. That's a waterhole. Still, the trees I planted along this one bend it a bit, and half roof it, bringing its wet underearth shadow to the surface as shade. And the reeds I hate, mint sheaves, human-high palisades that would close in round the water, I could fire floating petrol among them again, and savage but not beat them, or I could declare them beautiful.