While travelling in high country in Victoria, I passed a sign saying “Grumpy and Ange.” The owners of the plot had their names on the gate—a common thing in rural Australia. I imagined the lives of these two—another Grumpy and Ange—not the real ones, but who they might be.

not rus in urbe but suburbia in rure

A mountainside of eucalypts,

Survivors, successors, of fires,

Clinging impossibly sometimes

To the thin soil of rocky places,

Roots in the interstices of rocks,

Reaching, probing, into a sky

That is high and dizzy;

And all about there is a dryness

Redolent of parsimonious rain,

Of storms that blow and threaten

But come to nothing much,

And yet, in this dry landscape

There is a majesty, an iron-bound

Dignity, an emptiness,

A chorus of echoes, the lonely score

Of a wide continent, its past

Destroyed by implacable nature

As often as it recreates itself;

But then, suddenly, prosaic human settlement

Intrudes on this sparse purity,

As here, unexpectedly, a sign

Announces the home of Grumpy and Ange:

Grumpy, he who ran a hardware store,

For years uncounted, who complained

About his customers and found fault

With politicians, priests, and policemen,

Wrote letters to the press

About this and that, was never satisfied

With the response, was grumpy;

But Ange—oh, Ange, now there’s one

Who never found fault, helped others,

Sympathised, baked lamington cakes

For good causes, helped grounded birds

Recover flight, made others better;

A true angel, Ange, and were real angels

To pause in flight across these skies,

Were to look down and notice Ange,

Would see her as one of their own, elect;

Would not see him, with his gaze

On the things that are unsatisfactory;

These heavenly beings would wave to Ange

And then pass on, into the clouds,

Into the white unlimited sky

And the silences that infuse the sky.