a beginning

It's like coming up:
The dogged ascent through trees,
The ground levelling out,
The sun drawing water; feeling the steady breeze.

Understanding
What you are, you are only to yourself;
And then living out
That difficult and lonely truth: there, is a beginning.

There is a steady breeze.

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.

Alive beneath the surface
Year-on-year they wait -
Through the dry tired summer
The flood of autumn falling
The winter dark

Invisible, silent and counting -
To press up their green hands
Through thick and pregnant soil
Endlessly clipped lawns
The rough work of pastureland.

As each tight gift of yellow
Unwraps in the brightening hours
What we are rings like an echo:
Spring visitors, aligned to a temporary life
Rooted by words.

I will remember
The song of yours
Until mine hush.

When finally the rain clears and in the morning you see trees
Against a sky once again open, there is the duvet mist,
The night's frost lidding the puddles,
And larger pools, iced like fractured windows,
Showing more trees, inverted, branches framing the light below.
A high red kite distracts your eye; the rising solar glow seethes
Orange, rathe waves breaking across leaves.

Those are hazel catkins over to the right; two blue tits weave
And chase after each other; old man's beard fluffs in a white web.
A wren barks loud, staccato;
Aloft, the mistle thrush praises survival,
Wrapped in a melancholy key, forgetful in his phrases.
Here's the first delicate apple green growth of the hawthorn leaves;
The pollard limes are porcupine quills, in sheaves.

You are cold now and draw your coat closer. Faster, the days swing
From chill to warm, as the sun sings louder with all spring hearing.
It's two weeks to the equinox.
The goat willow herds her golden flower flocks.
It's this bright communion, innocent of design which unlocks
You. The birds nest not for a reason, but it is chicks they bring.
Four cormorants stand by the lake and dry their wings.

The old human lived amongst the sublime:
The scents of rosemary and lemongrass,
The May Philadelphus;
Fragments of phrases,
An upward cadence,
Or the step-missing minor inflection
Which seemed to him to be heaven;
Was it the words (which failed him)
And yet defined them,
Or was it the way he could claim
The chemicals in the air,
The sound waves on the stair,
And explore them, discover their long approaches,
Gently rising slopes,
To find such immense fields of sky;
So wild to have been alive.

Sometimes he found himself preposterous:
The sense of continuous unfolding,
In every second blooming
Out of the shadows -
The light on the primrose,
The mad whinny of the nuthatch,
The sudden insistent chiffchaff;
All that he could not remember
(Not all together),
Yet each impression was as clear
As the minutes spent
With those who’d meant
Something, only to be released
To the sad seas;
But that was the roll and fall of water;
His part was not to surrender.

As the day dropped down to stillness and slept,
He thought out his quiet messages
To the dusty images
Of faces long gone;
And to those carrying on
Without him, somewhere synaptic,
Blood-warmed, separate, connected
By voice, by sight, by touch,
By the past:
All that he recollected
In them still,
Whose mysterious will
Had bound with his and been severed,
Settled, forgotten, rediscovered,
Ruffled by slight ripples at depth;
By echoes of that which was kept.

Several things lost their lives as the night grew:
The bedraggled mouse the cat left on the lawn;
The tulip I uprooted,
Making space for sweetcorn,
And left, forgotten on the flower bed;
The shiso, new leaves marbling deepest blue,
Eaten by a slug.

Every year I re-find the root trainers buried
In the junk under the greenhouse bench, fold them,
Brush away white spiders’ lairs,
The faded algal scum,
Smell the dried loam in the warming air.
You, my distant children, will inherit
These from me,

Sort in the beans, white pills in a dark bed,
Water their seeking roots, the slow shoots,
Offer them to the trenched earth;
Follow the flowers to fruits.
This is the take and give, the frantic birth,
The 24-sided web I found in the shed;
The cupped hands

Of seedling parsley seeking forward.
And here am I remembering you,
Your jewelled existence,
Like these sudden blooms,
Seraphs, certain, transcendent;
Yet now I’m not sure you really occurred.
I turn to water,

Finding again these fragile treasures.

It’s April. The valerian has unfurled
Its long, ragged, steely graceful leaves;
Hunches around its tips; prepares to flower. Curled
Under the sprawling rosemary the brindled cat
Seals the warmed earth. I did not receive
The message you did not send, for all that
I had hoped for its shallow vacuousness.
I love you and I hate you unceasingly
As I stare down my maddened emptiness,
Pitched amputation, ache of memory.

All the detail: that great heavy mansion,
Rooms of fury, patient staircases,
An attic of jumbled friendship, stanchions
Holding bruised walls and floors; your face, so torn
Up with yourself I could weep. Tear down, raise
It, annihilate the brutal skyline, born
Of a planning blight, a blind compulsion.
My love and hate are just a pointing finger;
While you left others out of your emotions.
Rail I forever; for you, nothing lingers.

          .          .          .          .          .

Prevail. Let your own roots make you strong.
Season’s end, you shall sleep and be restored,
And all you ever wished for pass along,
Out of this dear, variable sphere, zone of will.
In the meantime, do not let the cord
That drags you from the past entangle still:
The man who failed the child can never change
The consequence of everything that’s gone.
It is enough to be no more estranged
From those who love you; and quiet me, valerian.

Loveliest of trees to look up into,
Leaves shadowed and shadowing,
A tapestry ascending,
The geometry of division
Against the randomness of excision.

The regular, planned, systematic,
Obscured as limbs twist and fall
Threatening chaos over all;
Yet swaying in the deceitful wind
Here, softly, a wholeness still rings.

Loveliest of trees to look up into
For a mind shrunk, hollowed
By uncomprehending sorrow;
Martins swim and dive in the sky beyond,
Flash white back to the cloud and are gone.

They are the words we shared, true and sharp
As on the day they fell between us.
Loveliest of trees to lie beneath,
Watching as the silence comes, and then
You hold out your uncertain, reaching hand.

It being still young spring
I look up at a harlequin green:
Beech and lime leaves, oak, all opening
To a new sky, to the sky that’s always been.
For each rhombus of light upon the lake
My glance is a water sprite, awake
To the song of the blackcap
Come back.

The garden’s amok
With twitchy spiders, quick over shadowed
Earth, the drossy bluebells and dandelion clock
Running to seed, now spent what they had borrowed
From the sun. While foxgloves hedge to acquire
Their bee-enchanting, freckled spires;
Oh! and the apple blossom -
So soon gone.

Yet the mignonette
Grows up spiralling, but slow, sedate;
After months underground where I forget,
Or think it dead, a week’s no time at all to wait.
The consequence of being late is strange:
I offer time to the impossible again;
To weld to you and become
One.

Becalmed out here,
I, too, let the hours flow past unseen,
Imagining your pigment in an old Vermeer,
Or a woodman’s jacket dyed Lincoln green.
A hoverfly patrols the fretty air,
Assimilates, turns, turns to stare,
Zips off to glean more pollen
And learn.

In this louvred richness
My wish is the simplest:
To sit alone in the sun
And not want to matter to anyone.

For Emily

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.

Thank you Jackie Doe for all your patient help