FULL TO THE BRIM.

On Monday, June 9, 2014, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

"The highest good is like water.

It nourishes all things but does not lord it

over them."
~ Lao-Tzu.

Woke to grey veils of rain off the bay

and the round moat full to the brim.

Running off the roof with barrel overflowing.

Wind blown leaves a flurry in the

drenched green garden.

All of this is just a preambulatory excuse to share some photo images. The way it looks is what most interests me. Apart from being one of those typical niggles that occur everywhere every day.

People grapple every day with mundane conundrums, inconvenient glitches and head bangers. Sludge pumps, cracked axles, blasted gaskets, leaky carburettors, dead batteries, fickle fan belts. Not to mention broken homes, broken bones, broken hearts, house fires, flash floods, mud slides, car crashes, earthquakes, explosions, tsunamis, plagues, aerial bombardments etc.

I'm blessed with being spared most of these things in the experiential present. Doodling with word shapes and liquid linguistics, to momentarily express something minimal and unmomentous. If ironically typical enough to be mildly humourous from a detached perspective.

Just a context for some recent photos, expressing artistically an ordinary experience of water.

So, here we go, lovers of the liquid illusions of wordstreams and water. Long story short, not forgetting to dot my eyes and cross my tease.

After a moment's due deliberation of process and a contemplative cup of tea, on a dappled bench where pussy willow pollen falls softly through flickering sunlight.

Bow-saw grasp, cut the black plastic down-pipe by the water butt, "kark kark" (the rasping sound of saw teeth through plastic.)

The offcut piece half spliced to wedge fit and slope. A chopped pine chunk to hand, a neat wedge fit between butt and ivy clad stucco wall, supports the makeshift elbow joint.

Outflow end yanked up tight under barrel rim.

Knotted length of coated wire flex draped over and out hangs down. A handy plastic flower pot weighted with a palm size stone. 'Gravity feed'?

Perfect. Solid. All plastic and not a penny spent. Technology reiterates ontology,or something. Taoist solution to the way of water. The answer close at hand. Simple, Lao-Tzu would nod.

Worked well and why wouldn't it? Then the rains came. Freakish for June, unrelenting for grey wet-blanketed days on end, a wall of grey across the bay, Atlantic and westerly.

Chorus:

Woke to grey veils of rain across the bay

and the round moat full to the brim.

Running off the roof with barrel overflowing.

Windblown leaves a flurry in the

drenched green garden.

Due to go into town, Friday being market day in wet green Munster. The odd windwrecked umbrella passing fleetfoot in the street.

The guttering out front too, sagging and clogged with falls of crowpecked moss balls.

Rain spills sporadic, splashing and splattering on concrete before the front door.

Flooding the drenched and drooping lupins.

Two heavy wheely bin-fulls of rainwater in a row, barely a stopgap.

Never mind bailing out the banks, mine are full to the brim, threatening to overflow, right where the onions grow.

Black plastic bucket grasp to handle it. Bailing bit by bit to swoosh and dump down the drain, lowering the level of in-pouring rain. First cast the moat from thine own eye.

 

Around a hundred bucketfuls it took. Rain down the roof, flooding into the garden never mind the pipe, brimming ripples down the barrel sides too. May day May day both hands on deck.

Later, on reflection, with a ladder, having tackled the mudclogged gutters, and out back, the downhole blocked with crumbling dirt. Tearing away wet ivy to plunge elbow deep in the mud silted pipe, face down many times between showers until almost got it clear now.

Grasping and groveling to feel to find a U-bend, that dull hollow reverb sloshing sound underground. Acheived at least a slow soak away in case it comes again.

And since then, been out to buy bottled water more than once ! Ironic as rusty old pipes, and there's talk of extra water charges ! In a land like this where water is in abundance free !!

While, underground, below pot-holed roads

"Oh Danny Boy, the pipes the pipes" are crumbling and what comes out the tap is toxic poison.

While my barrel runneth over, full to the brim.

Hush ! ... The sound of rain !

//// //// ////

Makes Rainbows / RBM.