life happened

A mean drizzle and the lash of cars
Passing. Only a green winter hedge
Separates the inward thrust and grudge
Of minds driving, from the generous grass
Of gardens where other lives quietly lengthen.
This five hundred year old oak has woven
A way through the monstrousness of people
Suffering, piped water to sky, laced roots deeper
Than we see it high and jigsawing cloud.

It overarches both road and black earth bed
Where I unquietly weed, searching faces past:
All those moments of promise, found and lost,
Patternless, knowing that though love is the thread
Which holds us together, it must unravel.
I cannot forgive myself for over-asking,
Locked away in a hothouse of self-doubt,
Reaching to hardier beauties to let me out,
Then quivering to mush in the cold ground.
Years of intensity, followed by silence:

One 'moves on', rendering all meaningless,
Vanished into the uncaring river of dreams,
A last surge of the brain, seeking sense.
So I accept - there will be no memory -
Life happened, is the best I can say,
Lying, like the rest of you, pretending
The air was infested, like this deep dark bed,
With random being, not worth keeping. Rot down.
Rot down. Rot down.

Brutal the cold,
Long my longing, over
Long my longing;
Brutal the cold.

Make me dormant,
Protected from wishing,
Buried deep;
Deep and dormant.

Only to wake,
Once spring breaks song,
Thrush at the height of the tree;
Awake and forgetting,

Everything gone,
Price of forgetting,
Pay to be free:
Of you; of me.

The trees seemed to climb so tall, that time ago
As we walked down the dipping road,
Dark ancient spreading yews, a higher oak;
Laurels crowding in, hornbeam further,
Dissecting the day, bark in a furrow;
And rising, rising in towers of candelabra flowers,
Horse chestnuts, spiralling up into memory,
Gracing the way to your piano.

You, so small and lively, chattering
Hand in mine, pointing a simple path to happiness
Out of the hesitant, empty gloom,
The fruitless turning over, thistle chewing:
Restitution, the May blossom of your playing tune.
What is it that a child gives without knowing?
The not-knowing; the chance of light unshadowed,
On the road to your piano.

Now you are grown, you make yourself complete:
Two willows bend to each other, boughs to meet
And branch on branch your lives will intertwine,
Until one day it will seem it was always so.
Yet it is not simple, the gift to combine;
Being yours, you will bring strength to a steady arm -
Patient of your fears, your alerts and alarms -
Seeing you are constant, dear to know.

As for me, when I am alone and blown down,
Roots all soggy, fit to burst and drown,
Tried by the gales and strops of sticks,
Sick with my ringed and barking inner dark,
I remember when you were six
And the cloud lifts; the horizon startles;
The cold moon of loneliness is eclipsed
And we walk together, once again, along that road.

Far years ahead, when both of us are gone,
On a tiny island in the sea beyond,
A shape of atoms, a dance of moments green and gold,
Where the prettiest of voices tells
Of dreaming skies which never grow old;
A precious joy, when you were six,
Chattering on, and there you will still exist,
Walking forever on the way to your piano.