Paul Deaton

The weather is unseasonably cold, the flat’s floorboards cold. In the garden the courgette flowers but fails to fruit. The tomatoes hang green and heavy, like water bombs. Everywhere the boughs bend, the elder with its black beaded bunches, its little popping mice eyes. The crooked old pear across the street is having a stellar season, lit up like a winter tree with row upon row of olive green light bulbs. No one comes or the boughs are too high. In disgust it is chucking them on the road.

The soot sunk clouds have gone — to blacken someone else’s landscape. The tugging, ripping, girl-fight wind that stole the weekend’s peace has been abracadabra’d away as though life’s difficult days never even happened. Sometimes the stirred world stills. The trees refitted and re-greened appear overslept and drowsy. How long have you been sleeping? How long in life wintering? Only the rustling get-to-it birds seem to have understood the new year is well and truly in, beyond beginning. Full of early summer’s song; watch the paired up love-struck teenagers career and chase crazily all over the place.

The sparrows banter in the bushes that crowd the walls of the World’s End alleyway as I walk to the library. There is, it seems, much to catch up on. Winter was bitter cold; five months that had us by the throat, five months in our house that were bone lonely. April. And earth is touched by the hand of a new sun. A sun, from its stoked store, that wants to warm us, pulls at zips, unbuttons a thick-coated Saxon taciturn resistance. The releasing rays bring back lost leisure: walking back home, in the dry dust of my road, a black and white tabby reclines, eyes me disdainfully with the look of a Cleopatra on an invisible chaise longue.

Late afternoon I speak to Mum on the phone; she’s sorting through her past, four hundred or so odd-sized photographs. ‘Well, you won’t want to do it,’ she says, ‘when I’m gone, I won’t leave you that task.’ We switch tack, not from fear, from silent truth, what can’t come back. We talk of mulish rough weather, April squalls, the wind’s choking embrace of a newly dressed willow, bringing it down, its road wreckage near her place. Dad’s death was like that tree. She talks in tangents. Is this what she means?

These sprightly flowers are no cowards. They poke forth sun seeking heads, proudly proclaim when earth remains clenched in winter’s pale dead. See, before you rise to your day, these shattering yellows hold sway, say something we cannot, or have forgotten, in garden, park and verge, believe, before there is proof, of what will come, sun’s surer rays, a time for warmer                             weather. But for now an icy wind ripples and the daffodils shudder and shiver, stunned by the life within them.

I sold the sleek black bike you said I should buy. My special treat, in the shop, on my own, I couldn’t fulfil. It took your love, your woman’s will to tutor me in the art of self-giving and not to fear the gifts that feed. My self-denial father’s handed down creed. Cycling was the emblem of our in-love-fun. We headed out evenings after work, met near the deer park, rode out that summer to an unending, un-setting sun. What now our love is done?

The moon comes knocking on our door; a slavish stalker who hangs around all night. The slowest of walkers, he matched at an equal distance each of our homeward steps. We close our door on him, push him out only to find he’s already skirted the house, taken the side alley, slipped the padlocked gate, jumped the flowerpots and several four foot pines and is staring fixedly through our unlit bedroom windows. He’ll watch all night, like this, through his scarf of cloud, the broken drape; while we count faceless sheep he waits. He holds the hours we conflate. The night marked down to his pin-point satisfaction he lets us go though we’ll never know at what thin hour he left. It’s been this way all month.