Boston, Massachusetts: stratus, maybe cumulo-stratus when I first walk outside, looking up. It’s humid, warm, high 20s, little to no wind on the so-called Charles River. I walk along the water’s edge, all brown and slowly going, towards the Longfellow Bridge. I make my way gradually, pondering the slow pondering of rivers. Then, eventually, reaching a kind of narrowing of the path by a road’s edge, I turn back and see a large, black-grey cumulonimbus rolling over Cambridge from the north west. The wind whips in first, the air is cooler, dust blows up, trees begin to lose leaves and small branches. The rain is light at first, then larger drops. People begin to scurry; then they start running. I head back to a café near the hotel, rain beginning to increase; I go in, order at the counter, then turn to see torrential rain outside; lightening and thunder; people scurrying, running. Someone walks undeterred, drenched, without shoes. I sit by the window and watch, eating, waiting it out for about half an hour; lighter drops eventually. I begin to walk back. Some people are very wet. A small finch—or more likely what they call a house sparrow—appears under a curbside tree, hopping on his two little stick legs.

How often do we see the full moon bring moisture, clouds, rain, humidity? This Friday night between the seasons of Djeran and Makuru, late June—no clouds, still and clear above, with the first stars shining through. We go up to the river, walk along it and, even though I knew it was there, I was struck by the actual sight of the top two-thirds of the big yellow moon sliding behind and up through the south-eastern horizon, a couple of spreading eucalypts in front of it, silhouetted. We were standing on a limestone hill looking over—the whole scene somehow so old and bony: moon, eucalypt, limestone cliffs layered up and crumbling away, the reflection on the water’s surface—a staircase, so they say, moving as we move; while all around us, nothing but warmth and moisture—drops already settling on cars and bricks—the air thick with it, in a way it not so often is here, without clouds…as if the equator continues its march, pushing south, pushing down.

For two evenings in a row I have stood under three noolyarak white-tailed black cockatoos as they flew from the western side of the curving river, across cliffs, to the eastern edge—two nights in a row, their long slow flap of wings, like a sculpting of air, the occasional screech let free. And then again this morning, while driving, further up the coast, three more coming into land in some backyard tree carefully chosen, though unseen by me on the road. Three noolyarak like three kings going.