Poems

From his work in the garden – those strips of wildnesstamed, the carpet lawn watered at the end of day –the gardener goes to his rest. Snails have been salted, roses stand corrected,hawthorn hedges are cut to the back of the headof a West Point cadet. Harebells, foxgloves, the white trumpetsof convolvulus – all have been destroyedin sweaty triumph. Only a few forget-me-nots,their eyes showing, are left, unrememberedunder the hedge. Into the last sunlight the ash raisesits rebel flame. Asleep in his armchair, the gardenerdreams of tree felling.

His brother is sitting by the window. The nurse has tipped a jigsaw puzzle on the table in front of him, clumps of grey cardboard, a twiggy heap nobbled as the oak leaves thick under the trees in the grounds outside. My father struggles slowly through the Day room lifting his stick as he looks around smiling. His brother has been told he is coming but beams in surprise when he sees him. I get some chairs. I want it to be special, an exchange of stories from the deep sequestration of ninety years shared lives, but they say almost nothing just find each other’s shaking hand.

The butterfly, rolled in the blind,A shape of grey against the gold,Becomes its shape again, unrolled,Still as a photograph, definedBy sun that shadows it, behind. Leaves of the roses, too, are castUpon this theatre of light,Stirring like wings prepared for flightBut, like the butterfly, caught fastThis bush, this blind — nothing will last. Not even that slow-burning star,Source of the greatest gift, our sight,Making our existence brightWith knowledge. Still, that time is farAhead. And this is where we are.

The Ship of State is rolling on,rolling on to its fate. The Captain is elsewhere.A cardboard mirage stands uponthe Bridge. Officers bustle round,looking important, achieving little. The Crew come and go,seemingly as they please, do enough, just enough, to keepthe enterprise afloat. But so much is automatic —and for the rest, the mantra is: avoid obvious danger,presume the conventional course. The Ship of State is rolling on,rolling on to its fate.

As when a man who has been dementing for years –old friends burst into tearswhen they see the ruins of his mindold lovers in despairlook up the rules for Dignitas – when he dies at last, gently, in deep sleepand one by one for the rest of usthe memories sweep back,how he listened, how he believed in dialogueand held warmth in his heart to the end – so, looking down from the cliffI watch the wild Greek ocean-going waveswith their cargo of flotsam and saltroil around the rocks, fan up in spray, spread their all-embracing murmur on the shore, and never stop.

Some of us can’t see the wood for the piles of notes obscuring the windows – notes on paper, in the making of which the established view has had to be dismantled. We try another tack, bend our minds to an alternative approach, but down on the beach it’s high-note tide, the smooth and shiny stones all lost beneath a swell of notes. We construct an origami boat, roll up notebooks for oars and paddle staunchly to the horizon where novel observations are reeled aboard like minnows and several drownings are noted. Those of us who make it back to shore find much has changed since we set off – even the words sound different now.

Who invented the clock, pray tell, time’s division, the ticking spell? An ice-cold man that hated song, who sat and thought the whole night long and listened to the starved mice brawl and beetles pacing in the wall. What invented the kiss? I’ll tell: a lovely mouth, you know full well, that kissed and did not think at all; it was in May, the wondrous call of bird and bloom adorning earth, the sun-god roaring golden mirth.

Awful you were christened on the eighth daywith a name that was like any name the christener’s gift.   Awful you were christened because your actswere so awfully and obsessively oddand broke every law of the house.Who would have known you served another lawthat advised your awe-filled dreadof what on earth would happen if you didn’t flickthe switch ten times, or hide the keys?Who would know you brought to the houseyour many awful and unlawful actsso awfully lawfully, so awfully full of awe?

Take back your big green foam rubber balland the red one with teeth marks, and the shuttlecock. Take the leather sandal kidnapped from next door.Take your chewed KFC packaging, plus the sachet of sauce, the paper napkinand the surgical mask you scavenged from the pavement. Replace the mountain of earth you dug outfrom under the roots of our sycamores, and the panel of fencing you knocked overon the way to trampling my bedding plants, snapping off tall foxgloves at the root,and dragging down my Rosa Mundi. Go squealing and scrapping in some other garden,with all your trappings. You have ceased to be cute.