1
In the year Victoria
came to the throne,
on 9 acres by a river’s bend,
(bought for £490)
Joseph Dover built his mill.
yarn
to weave,
wool to knit,
the raw fleece
washed, carded,
scribbled, tentered, dyed,
spun and woven
(back parlour or
mill shed)
finished,
sold.
Today the fleeces are
burnt at the farm,
and the sheds and lofts
display colourful crafts.
The past is collected in
sepia photographs,
strange heritaged tools.
The present hides in
figures on the footfall,
those costings for the café.
In an August
of grey cloud
and persistent rain,
the sun on occasion
shakes the building into life;
it filters through the tall riverside trees,
makes swathes of coloured light
swim across the wooden floors.
2
The studio, cool
on the hottest day,
is graced with garden flowers,
and the business of making everywhere.
Days fold work into the pleasure
of small gestures of care,
Satie’s tenderest song
a litany under the breath.
When toes meet
beneath a table shared,
this touch registers
the slow wonder of it all;
that ‘being here’
in this expansive place
of stone and wood,
textured always
with the white noised
rush of water.
At night we steal back in
to sit together by a single lamp:
to decipher Henry’s mimetic prose
of estuary, moor and river;
ponder Robert’s quartets in A,
every phrase singing Clara, Clara . . .
Later, lights extinguished
we move in the pitch of darkness
through the long galleries,
carefully down the invisible stairs.
Outside, in the
coloured silence
of the river’s run,
the hills carry the sky
cloud-haunted, star-strewn.
moon-lit.