Holy Hay

I didn’t have a chance to show you
the sainfoin I sowed back in May,
remembering our holiday in Spain
where we kept seeing it in bloom
by the road and on waste ground, covering
whole hillsides, great cerise stains
of what we later learned was Holy Hay.
Back here I bought some and spread it, watching
as seedlings appeared, unfurled nodding leaflets
in the rough and roguing wind and rain.
Maybe it was the wet, or the rabbits;
whatever, just one made it through to flower,
when each closed and softly bristled brush became
a clump of rosy Jagger lips. Yet I remember

wrongly: it wasn’t Spain, it was Sicily,
and maybe what we saw was Sulla,
Italian sainfoin, a deeper red colour,
but its name would never stick with me;
not like Holy Hay, coumarin still drifting
from an early mowing, with vetch and clovers,
sweet vernal grass, sown by an unseen other
who disappeared with the passing spring.
That’s why I tried it in our garden,
feeling it somehow sacred, so it might recover
the past; seeing it there you would laugh and
I would find in that perennial trait
passed down from your dear, faithful father
a way back to those fertile fields of grace.

Find this poem also at https://cassandravoices.com/culture/literature/poetry/holyhay/

(for Clare and Neil)

Down in the border
two feisty neighbours
rudbeckia and cosmos
nudge and squabble
cosmos fragile drooping
rudbeckia nearly brash
yellow sea peppered black.

There are you two
jamboree of clear lines
adorable children
vesuvian laugh
embered smile
when he will reassemble
no-one knows.

Past trembles
mill pond
wrinkles
(that laugh again, smile)
togethering
tumbled
authored by what you shared.

Minutes held in amber.

The mustard family goes for racemes,
of naked, stalky, four-pointed flowers
which come to fruition as pods,
more-or-less gawky and lumpen,
sometimes just round. Their leaves
are flappy, often with irregular lobes
(think of rocket). The whole affair
is unsophisticated, brash and —
in a word —ugly.
So why do I study
this candytuft with such passion?
These days of wildflower mixes it’s everywhere,
pink, purple or white, built like meccano,
rigid and stark, yet in bloom it succeeds
in being better than pretty. And soon,
improbable as one of Ovid’s ravishing gods,
it transforms into spiralling towers
of siliculae, tiny warming pans of mauve and green,

each drying slowly to reveal a seed
limned in a shoji winding-sheet.
Puzzling, I want to know
whether it’s not only the thing
but also the name, Iberis amara;
Iber or Ebro in Spain; amara meaning
endure (dead stalks last into winter),
or bitter (to keep insects away).
Or is it not what it is
or what its name is,
not what we can or can’t say,
or even what we can consider
is known about 100 million years of peening
form to function under selection’s hammer.
Then sun undims
to show an unfocusable shadow
of the lax racymose corymb. See —
neither plant nor words, but what both speak to.

By this time bramble hangers fall long,
straggling over the hedge and through trees
to the ground, where they quickly root.

The tip of each shoot becomes a new base;
leaves, which grow at 45 degrees
to the stem, bend away from the roots.

The hangers, now fixed at both ends,
turn tough and dry, and soon make a thicket,
sharp and closed, a place for rabbits to hide.

At this time the swallows go,
sentries of spring and summer;
a time-store lies spread out,

flowers now seed pods and fruits,
days pressed and squeezed dry,
shortening.

The wind sweeps suddenly a little cool;
autumn whistles in the distance,
all its beneficence shady.

I can’t explain what happens at this age,
only that death seems gradual,
starting with the will.
You hear the whistle and obey.

Truth is, I don’t know if I’m getting senile:
I can’t remember what it’s like not to forget,
and I can’t remember what I’ve forgotten, while
remembering not to forget is tricky. Yet
forgetfulness should be easily cured — a knot in a handkerchief,
a ‘note to self’ — if only I’d remember to look;
I’m forever forgetting where I’ve put stuff it’s important to keep;
perhaps I should write it all down in a book
of tomorrow, of what will come next,
so I’m ready to remember things as they occur
and can’t be second-guessed by the present
consequences of what happened yesterday and — what do you expect —
I’ve forgotten or otherwise failed to preserve;
then it’d be easy to be wise before the event.

After recent rain, an answer transpires
in a sappy hum, wakes dull bay leaves
and polishes up the serviceberry tree
whose branches layer to a lattice
when you stand below,
become church windows,
and the whole outside strains,
crammed to burst; and now, new
tawny buds unwrap, flowers outstretch
their slender arms, coddle the searching bees,
their guests; and I, so blessed
to receive it all, bear witness.

As a small bird — sparrow perhaps —
darts from hedge,
an almost-thought breaks cover,
I watering basil, flat-leaved parsley,
runner beans pleading to go out.

Maybe it’s Tom’s pale lilac,
host to a pure white clematis,
cruciform flowers in the easterly sun;
or the stairwell light
of an Edinburgh townhouse in the ‘80s;

or just yesterday, Sara saying
‘maids and swains’
by the boat, the century-long echoes;
a blackbird with a carpenter’s whistle;
or even Rhus glabra (the words not the tree).

And just when I’m sure I can’t place it,
the answer comes.

No longer the random outcome
of the small deaths
of two selves creating another.

No longer the new self that becomes,
unknown to itself,
birthing brief meaning out of selfishness.

No longer the need to re-run
pictures and words,
what was then and is now, the people

no longer absent but present, become
present but absent,
or wring out nothing from it all.

No longer endure the steady hum
of self in action,
doubting, faithless, wishing

no longer to be numb
from lack of faith,
and the impertinence of the know-all.

No longer constantly to be undone
by the louse of anxiety,
burrowing, chewing up the rotten self.

No longer.

This brain is a hive
where mes hatch out,
one for each occasion.

When I came alive
a queen me set out
on a frenzied flight of mating.

Those were difficult days!
Maledom nabbed her, then
filled her with the wriggling

resentful agonies
of incipient drones penned
in crowds of isolation

where nothing atones
nothing atones
or sets free, but isolation.

Next the eggs became
innocent twisted larvae
fed on nectar of desertion,

pupated to emerge with many names
but one uniting key:
the underhand — the keeping hidden.

For years they would arise
from the social sperm I carried with me;
some started early and were persistent,

like the conversational me (who lies);
others took shape gradually —
as in the family me (needlessly distant);

others again are brief,
and die in pain,
my own drones

hurling themselves at people
(especially women)
to crash alone.

Then there’s remembering me,
re-living each excruciating
failure of every version

now the queen has run out of mes,
and all that’s left is history, waiting
to be forgotten.

A honey drop sinks due west
and earth has spun
into the wide gaze of spring,
day outstaring night to offer again
its melded light for harvest.
I can hear the sparrows chattering.

I love to think of the woken
bees in the wall,
where a scented queen
holds court, her foragers mad for the hellebore,
flowers now failing, seeds set like suns,
each a bond to be redeemed

the season following; to see
new shoots of the fire vines,
only pips in a pot
three weeks ago, watch their leaves and searching bines,
veins like tributaries, and the weave
of a spider’s web that rocks

in the draught of my breathing.

Just had the grandkids to stay

what a nightmare
puking up banana
wanting the same stories, over and over
not going to sleep, then
getting up at some blank hour
only to play with those same trains
until it’s time to eat
and throw up again.

And yet

sleep remakes
they stutter awake
water is wonder
raindrops are crayons hammering
tunes mesmerise
moon flies
bee beee beeee!
and words — words are entranced by them.

Nowadays, weariness at times blends to dreaming —
a jumble of thoughts

Cath tying up the clematis in the wind;
faces out of the past, strangely severed
from voices that make no sound
yet live,
a distinct impression
an essence distilled,
caught in the locks of a droughty mind.

Other times I hear my own voice singing —

‘if I could choose contentment
it would be like this,
river breathing in and out,
rain squalls, green ryegrass and fescue’

and then ‘though not so solitary’.
But no. Cancel that.
Remember how people actually are.

Better in dreams, let’s say.

Midday on the second day of the year,
I felt the thud that took two slates away,
an overpressure flayed out of the west,
over the riot of grey skelly Tamar.

Out into the crackling light as sun splayed through;
out into the roiling early afternoon,
greens and browns, primeval and crammed,
volatile, lit and rising, rising all around,

burst of rank being buoying me up:
I could blow like the fretty leaves of eucalyptus,
touch the blue encircling cowl, hear the rush of it, up, up, up:
breathe — a brief, enduring bliss.

Fifty years, more-or-less, have passed —
two human generations —
since we parched together in those desert days.

In between, you found and loved a true one,
furnished your seeking will with resolution,
hope, belief — the things you thrived on:

but now, in a trice, he’s gone.

I keep returning to those early ways,
wondering what you would have felt, had you known
you’d be so full, and then so alone:

resolute, hopeful, trusting — would be my guess.

We were waiting on the sand to swim —
you towards the ailing world and him;
me aimed at a non-existent land

these fifty fecund, vanished years past.

If you’d asked me, I would have said
dying is not possible —
my friend cannot cease to be.
People stake a claim on space,
on now and then: permanent,
inerasable — like me.

She lasted the night
drifting amongst icebergs of the past.
“Christopher’s dead”, she said.
“Been gone 46 years, Mum”.
A big one that, enough to sink a liner.

Next, she slid down,
lost to all reckoning, her dissolution
sucking in the ripples
from her sinking.
Death, less astonishing only than life:

Wyn Massey, born today,
rising through the eddies
of his great-granny.

I’m not really gardening —
I’m waiting.

I’m not listening to you —
I’m waiting.

I’m not really practising the piano
(my heart’s not in it) —
I’m waiting.

Sure, I’ll come for a walk —
while I’m waiting.

At the moment I’m wading through Conrad’s ‘Nostromo’ —
in a detached kind of way.

Disinterested, that’s me.

Neutral.

Waiting.

It’s been a life-long condition,
not engaging.

I read the grandkids stories (sometimes),
whiling away the time.

It reminds me of reading to my own kids,
which reminds me in turn:

the things I was not expecting —
the effortless, things that happened anyway —

are more than enough, that is —
worth not waiting for.

I bought a bookshelf kit.
It didn’t seem complicated —
shelves and dividers, a backing board,
a few of those bolts that lock with a half-turn,
woodscrews and some washers —
until I realised I’d no instructions
for assembling all the bits.

It’s an easy item for the manufacturer to omit,
so I had a go anyway,
until I found it wouldn’t fit together right.
Maybe it’s the order in which you do things;
and perhaps where you put in the screws.
Whatever, I’m afraid it’ll always be wrong.
A lamprey sucks its victim’s

innards bit by bit
and has replacable keratin teeth
so you can’t get rid of it.
At school, humiliations fastened on to me:
I was broken up and down —
and couldn’t find the manual
to make myself again.

At 67, I’m still in bits.

From being told you are beautiful,
to your son wishing you were dead
(yes, it will happen),
the tastes of the amygdala are fickle,
the decline of the physical, steady;
what do you live for now, though —
entertainment of the senses; friendship; love?

Or is this the humiliating truth:
only in the grip of fancy
do you approach peace,
an asymptote always out of reach.
You thrill to the process of discovery,
until you discover we’re all ordinary.
So you settle for barren fruit,

eyeing the greener grass around
an invented other
who cannot be.
Seeing this, brings a shudder,
a quiet sinking through the folds
of in-turned mind become old,
hobbling amongst desolate surrounds.

Take a holiday from being you —
go somewhere there’s a person
you can be proud of —
that’s not possible?Then pursue
ecstasy of the soul: devotion
to the long lives of the inanimate,
pixies, gods, the jump of a cricket.

(elder: one who lived in former days)

In a flow of years I have been sea, river, estuary —
all this enchantment partakes of me —
the winter’s ice in the autumn sun;
great trees rising up to lean long on the wind;
plumes of rosemary wracked by salt spray;
eyelashed pods dried empty of willowherb seed.

Catsear choir beside this bank of song,
yarrow and scabious at their shoulder,
ringlet and tortoiseshell deft on the breeze;
low hedge of sloe and squabbling under,
a huddle of bottlegreen bedstraw, froth of panicles
rhymed out of nothing, and by no-one

but time and the fingers of abstraction
              (selection pressure, random factors)
fashioning form out of death, character
from the nondescript, a flat beginning
made geometric, fragile and fit. “See if Henry and Ed
run up and ambush from the look-out point”:
boys become tumultuous men, the stream daddles on,

one day, they’ll be here again, blent with other features,
guessing at the thoughts of their fathers —
sessile oaks wrestling a wild zinc ocean,
gale-sculpted holly, crimsoning hawthorn,
land thrown up at distant margins;
voices behind voices falling further and further
back to the moment of passing that will not blur.

I could sit here all day
watching clouds bank up, and roll away
to leave the filtering sun,
the river’s silver tongue
and recent rain like tears
on late summer leaves
of rose family trees,
spring’s scattered fragile pink,
now near-ripe fruit flecked red over gold.

The cosmos in a vase —
white flower with rays like a child’s sun —
my mind full of beings who once were human:
Mrs Matthews, thought to be of Irish descent,
too quickly gone, with a “won’t you sit down?”;
then light breaks through the window and glass vase:
white flower rays and ten seconds passed.

I could sit here all day
watching clouds bank up, and roll away.

He had thousands of kodachromes
when he died. Nowadays they’d be snaps
stored on the cloud, given back
tritely as memories by some iphone.
Anyway, they went in the bin,
regardless of what they meant to him.

I have chameleon words, collections of notes,
playing the same role: tie it down —
capture it. What? You, me, the sound
it makes to live; not bringing old stuff close
again (that was bad enough back then),
but the dazzle of being able to comprehend.

Of course, insects don’t waste being alive
worrying about themselves;
they continue to batter themselves
against windows, the life of the hive
before their own; or fanatically nest
under stones, enslaving aphids and the rest.

And rabbits are the same, chewing and getting rattled.
All have better things to countenance
than their own permanance.
It’s baffling that we are so saddled,
knocked over by the whole picture.
What it says in the Scripture

at the start — about Adam and Eve:
it’s not really about sex and so on;
it’s about seeing yourself, alone.
Waking up. To what you may believe.

This garden terrifies me —
free-falling, higgledy-piggledy,
once pretty wildflowers all blown about,
cadaver stems canted towards furious clouds.

The veg patch is a slum:
rampant buttercups smother the last onion
as I straight-jacket celery in newspaper and string,
while rain-drenched lettuce froths over, rotting.

And these fruit trees signal disorder:
some I pruned hard, in pique, last winter;
the rest now improvise in solitude —
slow, unconscious lives, at the mercy of my loppers, too.

Everything’s gone large, or small:
over-cared for, or not tended at all;
evidence of something wrong, I can tell,
this botanical flop, this jaundiced, abandoned realm

shows a weakening grip,
vacillating will; strangled or let slip,
it speaks of an inconstant nature —
an infertile mix of hubris, artlessness, and despair.

time is doubt
time
is doubt
shelving down
the innocent dead lie down
here she lies abandoned and beyond
all her memories gone
what though was passed on
other than young
all her suffering gone
the great walls around loch more
rise up to the meallan liath
coire mhic dhughaill
from where at times the clouds lift
to show the distant shining sea

The rabbits didn’t know the wind would blow;
the mint-golden beetle saw a shadow
but not that it meant foot;
the mirabelle plum had no means to guess,
that a week of cold would keep the bees at rest
and a barren year would follow to boot;
does the robin remember the rain last autumn
or the apple the ripening sun?

the way the hedgerows,
which I thought ran parallel,
widen with distance;

so many hues of green,
casual and careless in their being,
an odd bird singing and there’s rain on the window;

the way all is full and final.

This is not my loss;
it’s your child who is everywhere,
in ways she was not
when she was.

Either I’m in your world.
Or I’m not.
That’s how people live,
carrying their worlds around like snails.
They act like they’re in hers, or his.
But it’s a sham:
they’re only chewing on them.
You can feel the holes grow
at night, when sleep won’t come,
when the curtain is drawn back,
to show the darkness beyond;
and there’s this rustling, insistent
sound of mastication.

The hedges are mad.
Honeysuckle, hawthorn, bramble
clamber over each other, swoon
in the musk of last night’s rain.
It’s mid-June.

Sweet woodruff is chary
as it packs its grappled flowers,
sets off to ramble;
serviceberry offers a tiny
hand of apples.

With the year’s tide
nearly full, time feels tired;
imagination’s all that’s new.
A coterie of bees blindly
pleasures the echium.

When I wake on a May morning
and move from room to room,
in corners, near windows,
behind half-closed doors,
I feel the feathery tug of spiders’ webs
on my forearms, around my legs.

In these days, late sowings
become bright green peepers,
and out of the dismal winter
thrum pale pink valerian,
purple heads of sage and chives, seeds
of white ransoms and sweet cicely.

It hasn’t rained for a week
but the midday grass is still damp
when I walk on it,
thinking how all of this invention
is made from time and energy — a shake of dust
and it could be lost,

how Francis Bacon
wished for paths of wild thyme,
burnet and water-mints,
their scents rising up
to purify the foetid human air;
and how the gift of my verbena

imagining, Emily, will transport
a life, any day now,
into the light
of this strange circumstance.
I leave my planting: tansy, chamomile, black cumin,
until the cool of evening.

I’ve let the world of people go
in favour of growing
spring evenings,
what all the buds know,
the jonquils and the willow,
the prattling birds,
water chasing water to river,
fold of showers.
What sage said April is the cruellest month,
the year’s promise
in its tall shadows?
Let the world of people go.

I leave the fleece off for as long as I can,
while they gather the strength of the sun;
collect up Emily’s woolly coat
and the tiny blue shoes of her son —
yesterday’s keepsake is a spall of sea green glass:
mussel shell fractures, bubbles of ancient air.

A thought seeds the coming night with frost.

How warm it is now. How clear.

Strange thing is, some old
isolated men contrive
deliberately to be more
isolated,

because with others around
it is harder and harder
to nurture the absence they are
becoming;

they hang back from the crowd,
shrink from conversation,
sweep the room with a furtive eye,
wistful,

bolt for cover, where they —
what? rummage amongst themselves,
weigh old grudges, disappointments —
pointless,

but familiar — the sense
of wasted opportunity —
the juice of the past
unsqueezed;

mistakenly alone,
they seek to be excluded;
not what they were
(or thought they were),
they fold up to nothing,
loneliness, incidentally,
emasculating them.

Wipe those greasy hand-prints from the window
(each marks the end of a single sciarid fly);
outside the day is dying yet again,
rippling across the mirror river below
to the shaded blue-black bank beyond, where
skeleton trees mark the brow of the hill,
and cower beneath close vermillion clouds;
while above, faint quiffs of stone grey hair
try but don’t cover a pate of palest blue;
then higher still, hanging from a furze
of stratocumulus, blinks Venus,
watching as the sun slides out of view.

Down here I am baked as dry as tinder,
a scarecrow stook where quibbles interbreed
to yield old sticks as crisp as anger,
ready to be consumed by fire - by need.

But what is all this fretful desperation for?
February is a resolute month for increase:
the hours; fair hopes and futile; songs of birds;
each day the sun riding higher than before.
I dig in the semi-dark, seeking purpose,
stumble over the past - in rusty earth
of an ancient field, those thin clay pipes
men used to smoke; bits of pottery, surface
white, a spider’s web of cracks; a broken
ale bottle, heavy and opaque. Someone’s world
began and ended here: who, no-one knows.
Worlds just come and go, like rain and snow -

everything flowers, everything withers
(I swat those sciarid flies and couldn’t care);
it doesn't matter that no-one remembers -
it’s the given richness, while you’re there.

Grey roots sneer beneath the trashed overgrowth.
Time has filled in so many crocus springs
lost to the chapping February winds.
Grey roots snigger as round the sun we roll.
Long ago an hour changed length through the year,
leaving the days unscathed. These words are said,
not knowing, but believing. Yet I keep faith
with the past, now it’s all that isn’t there.

Some mornings, when the rain breaks
and there’s a little brightening behind the froth of clouds
(white on top, stone grey below),
while the Canada geese march the margin of the river,
beyond slatey-blue and liverish mudflats,
I feel my body warmth, single thread of a pulse,
watching the birch tops nod and step in the wind.

By late afternoon it’s rained some more,
savagely, but in the stillness that follows,
the level sun, gatekeeper to a golden-green bobbing track over water,
eclipses the page momentarily with pink-edged, yellow ghosts;
looking up again, there downstream is a dinghy
on its mooring, crosswise as the tide turns.
With luck, Venus and Saturn may show soon after the day’s gone,
low in the south-west sky, if the cloud there shuffles along.

Night falls and the last starlings fall,
once pin-prick flowers, now dark petals
scattering out of a leprous sky
to roost for a while, become cars,
tetchy, merciless and wide-eyed
owls feeding off silence.

Listen to the curlew’s mewling cry,
wish the eerie, gurgling geese goodbye
and watch the centering sun arise
to prowl.

Alhabor is a lamp
8.6 light-years distant;
hormones concoct me: down -
up - from Mariana gloom

to wave-silvered moana in a blink,
outrageous longing in between;
the tricoteuse of ATs and GCs
frowns out

at extinction’s forces: mountain building,
volcanoes, asteroids, people.
All are incidentals on a giddying
journey around the sun,
all are blessings. Yes. No higher power -
just the inconceivable.

The rain that now rains on me will rain soon on you,
carried eastwards by the aimless skeltering wind;
I whisper through its tears to flow my love to you,
as memories unsummoned conjure and combine:
the way the light somehow collects around you,
what was born in you, balance and rhythm,
aligned in grace, the kid to be near, the man grown true;
and all unasked for, accepted unsigned for,
though I pen the nameless sender daily in my mind,
relay my thanks, poste restante, for a gift so pure.

What am I to do about
this handsome schooner brown,
sails of Tilia yellow,
and there, the brimful orange beech
against the still green sea of ivy?

Carotenoid stars, they etch
across a hostile memory
an answer to my stranded doubt:
see how at dusk they glow,
heirs of light in an earthly crown.

Cup a pear, hear it abscise,
number the days until ripe;
the river chuckles with swollen pride -
back to a ditch by six,
drained away to the scaly, selfish sea.

At dawn there’s steam across the water,
a cloud of egrets scuds over;
old and waiting, mud for water,
leaves for a last breath
of wind, tremor, helical free fall -

after life, lope and leap
to nattering heaps; then left
to turn to mull, down horizons sift,
forgotten shades of ochre,
lignin nets over rheumy, russet stones.

Fish the shilletts from their dark homes
in the deep, brown ocean;
grateful, cosseting crumbs swirl in,
close and ready for roots:
succouring limbs of bulb, corm, meristem.

Here my mulling days are numbered,
pride in appearance doomed;
hares teem across the water,
while clouds of regrets scud over;
for I am old and loping after life.

After rain, water droplets
gather on the wand flower stalks,
splayed firework showers;
a pin of light rests
sun side of each.
I find the first fronds of the St John’s
chamomile I sowed a month ago,
next to the viper’s bugloss,
which is coming well.
All sure signs of the presence
I obliterate.

Thinks of -

the plumed and glaucous pampas grass,
power pylons that stride westward;
the amelanchier over the septic tank,
the round-headed Lane’s Prince Albert;
wrangling the half-dried washing in,
dishwasher tablets to buy;
a two-masted yacht which tacks slowly away
to the sound of a buzzing fly.

Everything past - unreliable him,
vessel for a lost Northumberland -
woods and badgers, the rare car thrilling;
an eruption of adolescence,
best but never forgotten;
the grip of the strangling bramble thorns
that sprout from the decades gone.

Everything future - births and deaths,
squadrons of geese coming in,
the flowers of thyme all summer next,
pale pink as innocent skin;
the pleasure of sleeping after lunch,
not caring that no-one cares;
the brief but blood-orange blush of the cloud
as the sun upskirts the horizon;
and how, with age, his mind will swamp the world
until it sinks to its final setting.

I hated Reading. The traffic,
the new housing, the old housing,
the tortuous bus journey into the characterless town;
the roadworks, the crammed car parks around
scrambling supermarkets; the compression of space.

But I keep thinking of those bike rides
down to the river, walking at Sonning,
Shiplake, Stonor, Silchester Roman town;
the kids going to school, returning home again;
the web and flow of their becoming.

Then I realise I loved Reading.

Here’s the choice: write on this label ‘Plum Jam’,
or address the perennial hunger to understand
how the all-consuming I devours
the proffered worlds of others and yet cowers
in the suet of unrefined aloneness.

Plum Jam.

Great seas have surged around me
all this time between not mattering
and not mattering any more.
So many eyes look through me,
so many have forgotten:
sand washed clean by the waves,
each grain washed clean.

Now I'm ashamed of my body
my mind refluxes, condenses
failures to bitter tannins,
dark and useful only
for preservation of what is now nothing.

But each new day is - it is -
an offer paved with hues of green,
light that lifts the clouds
over gulls that skim over
a shouldering stretch, and beyond
the mudflats and frowning farms.
Each day that whistles and is gone.

For a time he tarried with those of recent memory,
Before departing to the realms of the forgotten:
Young men with pipes and neatly parted hair;
Unknown, beautiful women at weddings,
The whole family arranged and patient,
Watching the birdie;
Dodos, consigned forever to picture books;
Grand lycopod forests compressed in coal,
All their steepling heights re-homed in warmth.

All that time alive, burning for contact,
Plumed into the indifferent air,
As others, his only guarantee,
Declined his need, became too busy.
But once, with his grandmother, shelling peas,
He knew in her love the measure of eternity.

It ran around the brow of a hill,
that sloping country way;
there talked tides of humans,
changing place
over the years, but all
with the same preoccupations,
burrowings of the human will;

the sifting words of numberless worlds,
dead and gone, or going.
I heard the whitethroat sing
of its spring nesting;
above, a buzzard unfurled,
mottled and blank upon the wind;
desolate, unspoken things,

the breeze in the east, sun out west,
a rain of stars on the sea;
bouquets of alexanders,
bumblebees,
red campion at the last
warmth of the day, harvest of nectar;
the better for being wordless.

I had to throw it away -
That picture she did when she was young;
It’s enough, enough just to say
I had to throw it away.

But after the bin men had gone,
I found that picture she did when small -
Stuck by White Tack to the bin wall.
So I kept it after all.

Someone should investigate
what happens to us with age -
how personalities change -
how what was once clear and straight
becomes crooked and complacent,
as we fiddle and fumble,
never hearing the rumble
as the train leaves the station
carrying those we care for,
flummoxed, angry, and distressed
that we will keep on standing
in our own light, narrowing
our vision until it rests
on nobody.

When I open the blinds to the growing hours,
there you are, lovely old damson,
christened by a sprinkling of alabaster flowers
proved through the dragging winter chill,
to tame for a while an early April sun,
ready for the mason bees to land upon.
No such watersmeet could for long be still.

When there’s a cold wind from the north,
I run on the high clouds, lovely old damson,
and your blossom and the ruff of the plum
are a fire of snow, a flickering urge
that leaps up into the arching blue;
there’s a sheen on the holly, matt on the yew,
an eddy which curls as rivers converge.

When the rambling rose stirs its shoots again,
there you are dressed in damascene bark,
petals confetti, fruits to be stones, then
stones become fruit for the far grandchild,
a hurry of summers ‘til the next one;
while you, and all of you, live slowly on,
ripples on our shores, ripples of the dark wild.

When no more hope can be dug from reason,
lovely old merryweather fair,
it’s ecstasy against dying out of season,
the late frost, the withering canker
of want, or a plunge in the ocean
oversoon. It’s the silliest notion
that the great grey pinguid thinking centre
washes out in a delta of despair.

A sudden shower of children caught us by surprise -
that warm kind of rain you don’t mind getting wet in;
just as soon, it had passed, as if we kept forgetting
the way they drenched us through and through, those pattering young lives.

Now, old man in the up-press of spring, spring breeze,
breathes in the butterfly browns and sphagnum greens,
plays across it those luminous, fading early scenes,
is all heart for them, only hopes for their hearts’ ease.

Hope is for valuing - they of others, others them;
a simple thing - but so easy to get lost in woes of me;
a strange thing - my children, their mother, were my thread

out of that parchy maze, the unravelling hem,
my protection. I dear remember them, those clock seeds,
butterheads, løvetann, lion’s tooths; ticking piss-a-beds.

In the failing light, a shabby pond
fringed with bulrushes, willow and reeds;
a hopelessness of ducks slides along
the grey water, while beside the rim
squats a bench no-one could sit on.
The ducks emerge and dry their wings,
wait motionless, reflecting
on the tangy taste of weed.

Dusk drums down the harbour,
Seagull sirens sound alarms,
A quiet motor sings;
Shards of mingling words slip away
Where huddled houses hug the bay;
A fish flops on the scalloped sea,
Ripples spreadly ring,
Ring, and ring, diminishing, to me:
Here are all enchantments reined,
Stowed within this compassed, solitary brain,

Haven to the slopes of coastal trees
Quiffed by parching westerlies;
Also, yellow leontodon,
Speckled on banks like sodium stars,
Where dreadlocked gorse gives way to grass;
Sheep-clipped sward; sun-lidded eyes; Doppler flies;
Various winds playing on and on,
While brambles leaf-ladder to the sky:
Here are all enchantments lain,
Meaningless, but marvellous, just the same.

Half-moon, bling of eventide
Hauls on saps which flow in time
To an ancient pulse;
Wyrt and weed together hear
The chuckle of the inner sphere;
Clackery of wind in rigging
Sees strait waters salsa,
Slap; soon sea-swells serry unforgiving:
Here are all enchantments made;
Out there, the consequences born, and paid.

Roses like suns arise and grow
Across the ramshackle brow;
A heavy scent
Swallows on the drooping air,
Is gone, recalled as summer
In the addled world behind,
Where wishes, sentiment
And bamboozling nature recombine;
Hence are all enchantments lulls,
Hummed by puzzled gardeners of the skull.

In a warm September, most days
We pick runner beans
As they rise, higher and higher,
Above the giddy earth,
Feel them coarsen as they lengthen,
There, in the lowering honey sun.

A comma probes the hemisphere
Of circle onion flowers,
Considers the pyramid heads
Of lilac marjoram,
But passes them over and is gone,
Lost now to the garden’s globe.

Hardly a bird sings in this quiet month,
The golden, fertile rush,
Surfeit of gages, the last, long hay,
An early apple end
To so much growing; and the favour of you,
Summer’s latest bloom and benediction.

It will be a lost world -
these solo views and searchings,
rationalizing words,
exasperated urge
at meaning. The dirge
follows after a flickering, is dense as earth.

God lies deep in my green garden:
star of dahlias (aphids coat the stems);
profligate daisy unburdens
a thousand seeds; one or two of them
may grow. Life falls hard,
but its waste falls harder, on the heart.

Every year bullet chives raise their heads and attend - 
Burgundy conning towers, they seem to scan us -
As we move around this ageing house,
Each step closer to those parents’ friends
Where we glumly went for supper. Revenge
Of time: the hand-shadowed, grease-grimed mouse 
By the ancient computer; the fridge door, bust, 
Fixed up with Araldite; the rickety henge
Of a rack of mid-priced wine - as if it
Helped, or could possibly make any odds.
An i-phone nobody calls, a cat’s bowl
That once fed a baby. Pictures of the kids;
Cutlery, plates, rucked lining in the cupboards; 
Jaundiced microwave, TV with crappy controls.

Do we not notice, or care, as we grow old?
Our eyes watch, watery behind out-of-date specs. 
Pushing behind the tired sofa our past regrets,
We become wistful, and more and more tightly hold 
Our history, pretending it matters: though we know 
The present alone can be counted true,
We still count back the days to when things grew
For us, too. The bees on the bullet chives go
Away white with a harvest for their brood,
As I brush amongst shapes cooly self-wrought: 
Meadowsweet’s steepling flare; questing arms of plum; 
Stagey cardoon, throwing up its arms at something rude. 
The failure of age is to be jailed by thought;
When in all these other lives, there is none.

This August day was hot with butterflies,
Sails which flapped white against the green leaf spray
Until they settled on blue-tongued kale
Or rested, delicate on delicate vervain.
All the world had been lost the preceding day,
But this new one was as pretty, contrails
So far missing, the not quite silence a surprise
As the amaranth, bloody and drooping, awaited rain.

Weeks of heat were pressed and squeezed into dreams
As we watched the cumulus build and drop
Until at last they towered, great billowing curds,
Statues carved out of the western sky,
And from the south first thunder knocked,
Then burst in, rolling and gurgling granite sherds,
A new, hanging cloud rising like grey steam
Over flushed fuchsia sheets beneath. Trees threshed dry

And withered human voices, stranded, whined
Out tinny words into the human vacuum,
While ice hushed behind a veil of vapour.
Then it hailed so that nothing else mattered;
And the ground sighed up its thanks. Gradually gloom
Ascended as the bars slid down, savour
Of petrichor arising, unconfined,
One more set free as the moment shattered.

Late summer is goosegrass burs in socks and shirts,
Smells of male sweat, cut lavender, dry earth,
Still sounds of pigeon wings and cooing,
Riches none can from the present bring;
Yet all is safely gathered in.

Lift up from the ground so the wasps can’t have them -
Purple plums and apples spreading pink, pears with stems
Snapped short by August’s muggy winds,
Hard fruit that splatter, viscous when I strim;
Gifts of moments gathered in.

September colours are the ghosts of green,
There all the time, but masked and rarely seen,
Until at last gold shows, then orange,
Season’s end; shuffling brown their long haunting,
As all is safely gathered in.

Still there you lie, brother, only bones now -
Where autumn lowered you, contusion on your brow -
Desolation ‘round the coffin ringed,
Out of silence, life but a borrowing;
And early yours was gathered in.

Grief grasps at the past but fumbles and cannot wrest
Any hope from the flow; a stranded love is left,
Searching for signs that ends re-begin,
As from a fallen fragment fresh growth springs;
But all we knew is lost and gathered in.

For years we thought about moving:
the rooms were too large,
the traffic was worse,
the neighbours had changed
and made strange cackling noises when they laughed;
but there was really only one thing to blame.

The kids had left home
and would never come back again.

Zounds! The hollyhock’s drunk again,
Sways from a footless fulcrum,
Lurches but cannot fall;
And the grapevine shoots
Thrash sclerotic leaves,
First resentful, then cross,
As they hunt like tethered wasps.
All is awash with wind
As the garden dims
And the year disappears
Into October.

Straight comes down the rain, briefly abates,
Swirls in a ceasing net,
Blows in pillows again
To burst as they beat up
Some teeming ahead;
A family of fallings
Receives a roof-full of applause.
And the trees are chattering
As the long hours scatter
Into memory
Behind October.

Birds fragment in an upward shower;
I thought they were starlings,
But that was long ago,
When the sky opened
Blind and assured.
Now there is only behaviour,
Real birds, man-made, free
Of me and you,
Of everything untrue,
Wonderful;
Free of October.