SEVEN PIECES, LOOSELY RELATED

[I’ve been tinkering with these seven pieces that were written a few days ago but which seemed only loosely related and yet, strangely, when I separated them, they seemed incomplete. I gave each one a title, then took the titles out again. So, for good or bad, time to leave them be and they stay together.]

Morning again. Grateful for it.
I’ve spent around 23 of my 70 years asleep.

The only sound, rain on the window.
The only movement, rain in the puddles at the side of the road.

Now a crow crossing, high up, dark against thick cloud.
Nothing glows, nothing shines.

On the wet field, water rises to fill my bootprints.
In the woods, a woodpecker taps on a dead oak.

You can’t set my sleeping ghost free
From turbulent failures and bad endings

I dig the earth of this small, wet, insular island,
feel the water beneath it.

At home I read that as the waters around New York rise,
Manhattan is slowly sinking under its own weight.

—

If you want iridescence
on a sunny morning,
lie beneath the head of a dandelion gone to seed.
You think it’s silly. We won’t watch.

Not blue tits flitting between leaves in the holm oak in the early sun.
Not bees in the buttercups and forget-me-nots.
Not the breeze in the silver birch.
Today please understand the world is outside this frame.
It’s happening somewhere else.
Somewhere where there’s rain.

What is more important, the beginning or the end of the sentence?
Or the release from the sentence?
Each of us tumbles down the centuries.
In our sleep we throw out our memories.
Who will catch them, make them their own?

—

Buttercups are taller this year.

My neighbour is hard of hearing.
When he speaks to me, he smiles.
When I speak to him, his face is sad.

You walk across the field carrying angelica
From the bank of the stream, and thyme.

A voice in my head says
When we travelled with the first three children, we saw
the bright orange lighthouse of Svortuloft, vivid against the snow.
When we married, you wore roses and freesias in your hair.

And, suddenly shaking me free of memories –
A cuckoo, at last. And wind from the north.

And rain.

—

With our grandson, I watch blue tits flying in and out
of the hole in the mortar in the old stone barn.

I lift him up for a closer look.
They’re fetching food for their chicks, he says.

What kind of food do you think blue tits like? I say.
He looks at me with wide brown eyes and says:
Pickled onions.

—

It took time to start the old tractor after winter. Wind had swept away the child’s bucket we put on top of the exhaust and when the battery had charged enough for the engine to turn, brown rainwater surged up the vertical cylinder and splashed over the truck and us. We laughed in shock and also in pleasure at the proof that the engine had not seized and that now it was simply a case of putting enough charge into it, so the roller could be dragged across the ruts left by the truck through the winter months. We mow late to leave cover for hares, curlews and the young stag who likes to lie by the fence of the furthest chicken pen. And then across the neighbour’s field a loud crack startled us – and we saw black smoke billowing from his new tractor. As flames burst out, he jumped from the cab. We watched the smoke become grey, intermittent, as the oil burned off. The tractor regained its shape but was no longer blue. The neighbour stood a way off, hands on hips, his hat pushed back on his head.

—

Some poems come from the barely conscious.

Sexless, genderless,
They organise themselves.
Shape themselves.
Adapt.

What do you expect them to do?
Create a huge crocheted textile inter-active playground?
Oh, yes, someone’s already done that.

I was with you in the years of freedom and possibility.

As strong as an ant, I would carry darkness and laughter.

Leave space for laughter, darkness to itself.
Leave space for darkness, laughter to itself.

Equal measures of coltsfoot, horehound and aniseed
will deal with bronchitis. Or so I heard it said.

Coriander, they say, is an aphrodisiac.
Fennel fights off obesity and evil spirits.

When I dig the soil,
the bones of my ancestors talk to me,
almost too soft to hear.

Secrets cling to my spade.

I can hear the water, way below.

—

In a drawer I find an old map of the village.
There is kindness here. Voices return,
slowly at first, then in a rush.

The rag and bone man makes his mournful call,
stops, says something to the milkman, and then
to two girls passing in overalls and sensible shoes
and they all laugh.

Grandad runs out in his cap
to shovel up the horse muck in the road.
He’s digging his celery in deeper this year.
The girls go up the hill to the factory with a wave.

Smoke from a back-garden bonfire of rakings.
Grandma yells at Grandad: Couldn’t you wait?
Can’t you see I’ve got the washing out?

A hedgehog shuffles in leaves under the privet hedge
where I stand to watch the unfriendly sexton walk
steadily up the hill pushing his barrow.
The sun glints on his spade.
His shadow spreads across the graves.

Grandma always said it was the sexton
who poisoned our dog, Patch.