In the morning
before the day gets too distracting
your piano’s at its very best.
 
Say Hello! to it with a scale or two.
Nothing quite like the harmonic minor
(in contrary motion – 3 octaves please)
to get its hammers hammering,
the pedals pedalling, and those
black and white keys
to skip under your fingers.
 
Bach today or shall it be Brahms?
Gershwin maybe, or just a little Grieg?
No matter what, they’re all your friends.
Nice people composers, no trouble to anyone.
All they do all day is sit in their studios
and dream about music.
Sometimes they write it down,
​carefully,
measuring every note and rhythm
​for your piano to play
before the day gets too distracting.

Most of the time
You’re fine
In control
Quite in control
And wholly focused.
 
But then the world
Slips sideways
And a fault appears.
You raise your voice . . .
Remorse envelops you
Brings you down
Down into a grey darkness.
 
Know it means much to me
To fold you in my arms
And feel you shelter
Even for a little while
Here in my imagined home
Built for you with love
To visit when you must and can.

This collecting; this laying out of treasures. A piece of watercolour paper cut to fit the sill of a window, then each object placed in a sequence. Stones and shells at first, then slivers of wood, a crab, a starfish. Eventually, small objects from inside the Fishing Station. Strange and so different away from their location. Strange to be displayed as distinctly separate rather than a gregarious jumble of ‘finds’. Their shadows fell with such delicacy across the paper, turning as the light turned, sharp-edged now, smudged later. I would catch her sitting before these collections, observing their properties as the window projected different qualities of light with the passing day. I had them to myself in the early mornings when I crept from our bed into the grey blue light of the dawn. I would sit before them with a china mug of tea feeling my body come to terms with its own self having left its shared part of me in bed. Every day seemed more precious than the previous. As the calendar moved relentlessly forward I realised we had begun to speak in whispers, beyond whispers in fact. I would look at her and speak silently in my head, as I do when I ‘say’ our silent grace, when I close my eyes and pause before the delight of a meal shared. She would nod, or answer with only the barest movement of her petalled lips. The most delicate stroke of my arm was a poem; a hand resting against the neck a chapter of novel. The volumes of words that we had between us come to own tumbled away into the machair. And living slowed right down. Every movement had a graceful turn, bend or flow to it. If we stood close to each other there was rarely the need to venture into an embrace. For once we were not about to part, we became completely, utterly together. We would listen to each other breathe until even that became absorbed into the sea's great breath we could feel from the cottage windows ruffling the waters.

Wind in the night. Rain against the curtained window. At the approach of morning the dawn chorus vied with the wind’s swirl and the rain’s beat. In rare moments of calm a blackbird’s solo song sang. Listening, listening whilst still seeking sleep there is a continuous presence of grey sound; are there waves tumbling on a beach, or is it air conditioning sounding across an empty room? Now drawing the curtains the morning is revealed in a tumultuous garden. Branches are thrown upwards into the dripping sky, downwards to the wind-blown grass. On the rain-drenched patio the mirroring flags are dotted with pear blossom.

for Susan on her birthday
 
Oh that I could write you a poem for your birthday
to greet you like the sun rising through the summer trees.
Today it's raining so ******* my roof and the skies are so grey
that such a thought seems, like you are, very distant.
 
My heart holds many thoughts of other birthdays spent together.
My memory's album is rich in images of these special times:
a boat on a river, sculptures in a park, a picnic in the woods.
Always the warm sun, the summer light, the gentle air.
 
A *Yu Fue song of the Tang dynasty says that Sun and Rain
together make the earth fragrant but the feet *****,
and that the foreigner,  whose home lies beyond the edge of the clouds,
should always hold to a happy heart however far way.

for Alice*

You’ve caught the colour
I don’t care how you did it
Tea the builders’ kind
(not my affected blend)
Tea and rust

It’s the colour of that sand
we stood upon
the first evening there
amongst the midges
when you paddled
like a child in the gentle sea
starfish at your feet

Now they are pictures
on the wall
finely framed
and in these little
books you make

This poem is trying to say
I’d buy them all if I could
but I have to let them go

Yesterday I discovered
how your miniature inscapes
capture a time and place
so precious to me
I had to hide my tears
and leave the room

You see I knew
those bird-like marks
(you’d sewn into paper
with your quiet hand)
were really our footsteps
seen from a distance
a measured dance
in the red sand.

this garden
touches me
like no other

it haunts
my dreams
with its
still rich
forms and colours

sunlight is
playing patterns
on the dewed grass

the nearby river
the echoing birds
the braying cattle
my slight breath
this pen’s touch
such wonders
of stillness

The rhythm should not come from the word.
The word is a key to unlock
the virtual library,
where our journeys begin.

The rhythm is elsewhere.
In the space between thought and imagination,
it is the crossing weft of ancient knowledge,
beaten tight against the fell.

What the ear registers, the brain acts upon,
the heart draws in to its own, or not.
What then becomes expressive,
is expressed variously,
in form.

And then, such delight in the connection of things!


Now the sun sparkles
the still-morning garden.

Beyond, just fields away,
the curve of a silent hill.


Just what are such moments?
Do they envelope time?
Can they be measured out in music?

As recollection calibrated
they are the essence of  
seconds’ snapshot-made.

Sequence disappears.
It is just the blink of the mind’s camera.

for Alice, Frances and Hester*

Clearing the town
of its Sunday streets,
up to the close-cropped
grass of playing fields
green and red and blue
frocked girls pig-tailed
in the Spring wind
brace their yet-to-be-shaped
bodies against the breeze
tugging at their kites
tossed in the air
by invisible hands . . .
Turn and spin,
climb and soar,
float, dive, dive, float
spin, float, spin, climb
and soar

We took the Blakeney boat to see the seals
basking as seals do on the glimmering strand.
We were basking too: a year married,
happy as the salt marsh larks
singing out their fragile hearts
high above and higher (and yet higher still).
 
 The sun sparkled on the ever so windy waves.
Tightly you held my hand in the bouncing boat.
And later on the island’s northern shore
we sat together on the sand,
castaways to passion, indelibly in love
and kissed and kissed and kissed.
 
13 June 2012

you’ve changed.
I noticed it
in  that final photo
on the mountain.
Your face
as ever fair
now aglow,
tinted with
ministrations
of earth and air,
wind and water,
the kiss and rub
of your lover’s lips,
the play of his fingers
on your freckled cheek,
 
but more.
These last days,
as though passing through
a necessary door,
as though changing a life-skin,
you have been transformed.
More beautiful now
than even this season’s light,
falling against your window,
filling this room to the brim
with the treasure of autumn.
 
I am entranced.
And why,
yesterday,
Dear Keeper of my Heart,
I stood transfixed in your kitchen
all sense and courtesy
flown into the damson tree.
 
Suddenly. . .

for Hazel and Joe*

Just walking the parrot
Said the lady on the beach
He's so shy you know this bright bird

If he were to sit on my shoulder
Seeing you children come toward him
He'd  fly off and away with the gannets

So he stays safe in his basket
Swinging on his perch to and fro
Snacking on cuttlefish and a millet bar

My son Steve brought him back from Belize
He's been my companion four years this June
No, he doesn't speak but he does a fine squark

I wake and the light of this fine day edges round the curtain.
The birds have chorused and my left foot lies cold outside the sheets.
Standing in my nightgown I draw the curtains and look out at my garden.

Let me pad downstairs, open the front door and walk brief steps
to the arbour of ferns and shells. From a cane chair
I shall view my private corner with its tiny pool and privet hedge:

whilst there is still a little dew; whilst the cobwebs still glisten;
whilst there is no wind, just a grumble of the surf at Porth Neigwl,
the sound my father makes dozing over his paper.

Miniature, enclosed, protected I will place my thoughts
in this dolls’ house garden, amongst the dank, dark shadows
of its many rooms, its parterred spaces.

You don’t walk in this garden; you take a step . . .
and you are elsewhere. Take three steps and you are quite lost.

I hear the kitchen door bang in the manor house,
Meriel is taking breakfast to my sisters.
I think I shall stay here a moment longer.

I wake.
The sky is clear blue
above the rooftops
whose shadows the sun
sharpens on the grass.
Dew on bare toes,
the limb-caressing air,
my garden breathes, waits, breathes
for you
these flowers . . .
I gather them against my *******
and lay them flat
on a cold slab,
cut, then grasp their stems as one:
to place in the red flower vase

For Jonathan on his 70th birthday*

Even at 70
I can’t imagine
one stops wondering

at those wonders
surrounding
each day and hour

clearly etched
recorded
in the growth of trees

where future states
are no more certain
than an April wind.

No bad thing then
to review
his life and work

to question again
where we think we are
in this world’s plan.

A life lived
between experiment
and pain

He teaches us
still to look
and look again

at nature’s fragile
patterning
and its chaotic hand.

‘Oh the mystery of
what lies between the
body and the mind.'

The afternoon is golden.
It has that light
only September
holds when
the angle of the sun
casts shadows
of a softer hue.
. . . and seeing you
in silhouette,
your back to the light,
(across this busy room)
there is a hint of a smile
as,
caught in talk,
your gaze attends
to the fielding of questions
. . .
So the while
I read your voice’s music.
Sketch the while
those gestures
I already know.