After
The space we stood around had been emptied Into us to keep … Seamus Heaney, ‘Clearances: 7’ Overnight, it’s autumn in the angle of the light, in the smell of morning, in the beginnings of night fog on the river. The black cockatoo flock starts to gather ahead of winter, young ones chattering and wailing as they fly, excited and chasing each other like children at a festival. They come down into the garden as they have done since the trees we planted began to grow up, to eat banksia seeds and check the blackwoods for goat moth grubs, on their way to the pine windbreak, where they’ll make a start on new seeds forming in the green cones there. The 11-year cycle sunspot cycle will peak in a couple of years and already, repeatedly throughout the month, our star spits out plumes of plasma whose energy blows outward through the solar system, strong enough at times to push