I walked in the park
To put myself right with the world.
I thought, ‘I’ve worked all day
I owe myself this time.’
Mid August and the late afternoon sun
Was already peering through the trees.
Was already forming lengthy shadows,
I thought, ‘Summer is on the wane
And there’s been so little of it.’
 
Away across the valley
The city is winding itself up up
For a Saturday night.
Lights twinkle and boom boom
Of the bass bins in the boots
Of the chavs’ motors boom boom.
Then the sirens start and the girls shriek.
 
Over the hill, past the lake,
And into the Rose Garden
Empty but for an elderly couple
Strolling strolling under the canopies of roses
The shade gloriously dark green
The shade so inviting to sit and watch
The geese launch into their evening flight
To scatter over the chestnut trees and away.
 
I sit where I’ve sat these many years
Usually alone, and at this hour,
And in this season resting in the perfume
Of Meg Merrilies and Harrison’s Yellow.
And now you’re here! I see you
Walking through the Gate of Two Storks,
Past the glasshouse with its cacti and vines,
To sit beside me with your brightest brightest smile.
 
I am so full of happiness in this day-time dream.
I am so full of happiness you are sitting here.
Your voice is a real as the rustle of your dress.
You rest your left hand on my right arm
And gently so gently stroke the golden hairs
Towards my fingers oh so gradually.
I hear the sweet breath of you,
I smell the sweet scent of you,
You are my dearest dream
My heart’s companion, my gentle lover,
My dearest dearest friend.

in this between-time
after the day-work
before a partying-night
outside in the city-street
I window-stand
people pass

a rich-day collecting
the determination of things
that future-spell so
I am replete with possibility
conclusions safely-stored
filed-finally I fill
with you-thoughts

board-pinned your photo
to turn to but I daren’t
eyes-shut instead . . .
and there you are
only more so as this portrait
- an august-glorious day
garden-full with butterflies
the sea-sound distant-sounding
only more so -
this portrait expands
to show all your sudden-self

a pause in twilight-termoil
I grapple – should I
let this brown-inked pen
flow inscribe tell and paper-paint
knowing full-well you favour words
that do not spell out what’s in store
when the bedroom door
closes-shut on poets’ licence?

so being careful not to press
passion’s path beyond the bounds
of touching-tender kissing-close
when once I would barely-break-step
to think of not exposing such
geographies of gracefulness
unclothed revealed to savour-so
the breath-shortening rise
the eye-closing slow-release:

please know to write so
brought you close
when you were not . . .

my dear-joy
I still my pen
hold thoughts in check
trance-like knowing now
(and conscious now)
of  other ways
to tell-out spell-out
characters desire-dense
ambiguity-rich
flavoured-full
beyond-beyondness

I

In the afternoon

Low cloud a shadow blanket
against the hills, stillness
in a summer landscape but for
insistent sheep,
a railway train,
pigeons conversing
in the tree-laced lane.

Before the conservatory windows
stands the kitchen table
relocated to accommodate
this making, these crafted
objects turned and touched
between her small hands,
between her deft fingers.


II

In wonder

You stopped by the roadside
in wonder at the profusion
of grasses, weeds and flowers,
whelmed over by a confusion
of chaotic design you know
can never be brought entire
to imagination’s mirror.

But surely a corner
of these complex forms,
in a quicksilver moment
you’ll catch – one day.
Until then, hold to this image
in wonder.


III

Whispering

Your beauty catches me
as a breath of wind
against the face
wholly and fulfilling
as your gentle kiss .

I imbibe your stillness here,
as head-pillowed you rest
into sleep in this quiet space,
this unaccustomed place
where coming together
(separate in our thoughts,
apart in our work),
we find ourselves
whispering,
as we meet: to walk
to sit to eat to talk,
as if to undisturb the flow
of measured actions,  
determined words.


IV

Patch and Sew

Evening gathers
patch and sew
this woman’s work
bent head
the forearm slightly
raised to hold
a purposeful hand
the needle and its thread
A right leg rests its knee
on the chair’s soft arm
a left-facing shin
foot-firm to the floor
On her lap the garment
she has worn today
she will wear tomorrow


V

Across the Valley

Across the valley
from end to end
a spread of hills
in clouds’ pale shadows.
Above,
their floating forms
of white, of grey
of dusky charcoal dark.
But look,
the sun peeks through
to fall in strips and squares.
The moorland coloured.

Waves of dry-stone walls,
they rise and dive to guard
the foreground pasture-land
where sheep are loud
and cattle uneasy.
Beyond, a wooded belt.
There, a viaduct’s arch.
Here, a limestone kiln
where her figure stoops
to pick up rusty things
off broken ground.


VI

Wild Flowers

Ah Sweet Briar,
my little Vetchling
from the meadow,
but common as Valerian
in a Lady’s Bedstraw.

Wild as Onion,
Black as Knapweed,
sweet this Meadow Buttercup
its great Burnet a Tufted Vetch.

Oh Hedge a tiny Woundwort,
Hedge along a Bedstraw
Crane's Billed in the meadow
that Ox-Eyed eye-oxed Daisy.


VII

Trainspotting

Figures in the field
they stood expectant.

Placed apart
As guns before a drive,
before the beaters
raised the birds,
four men wait for a train.
One braced against a wall,
camera at the ready.

Out of the still afternoon
a heavy breathing monster
displaced the valley air,
the sounds of bleating sheep,
the twitter tweet of moorland birds.
It appeared just for a moment,
revealed itself entire.

Seven carriages red,
the engine green its tender black,
it crossed the Smardale viaduct,
(as if posing for a photograph)
then disappeared from view.
Nicely spotted.


VIII

At 5.0am

To sit in silence
at this early hour
knowing the inevitability
of my desire
to touch
your waking self
warm from sleep.

It is at once so beautiful,
and yet so difficult:
to put such thoughts aside,
when the paragraph begs completion,
when rhyme and rhythm
seek right resolution.

I pause constantly:
to hold myself close
to your imagined cheek,
lightly-freckled
by yesterday’s
sun and wind.

I so like you in purple.
It gives me a lift to see
how carefully you've
mixed and matched
chosen these tones
and textures to suit
yourself and make
a pleasing picture
purple-themed
for those that share
you when I'm not about.
 
 . . . and not being there
I often think of what you wear,
think of times and seasons
patterned by your choice of clothes
that give me so much pleasure still
like well remembered friends;
a certain skirt that falls and swings,
a dress that holds your body, clings
to your long thighs, and seems
to make you taller than you are.
 
Such simple pleasure clothes afford
When chosen well and worn with care
for colour, fit and flow
              with style and sense
and understanding (which you have
you know) of your dear body's
form and grace, and movement
as you cross a room,
        stand still in thought, or drive a car.
So much to love and to admire.

It had been snowing all night
light slight white
almost invisible flakes
falling on the garden below

While you slept I lay awake
between startling dreams
adventures (with my children)
amongst pinnacled peaks

Should sleep in an unfamiliar room
so effect the unconscious mind?
Here you became a young adult
‘I lost my virginity’ (you said)
‘and it was messy’

I didn’t want to know this
but told you how it was
for me a beach at night
in Devon Tarka country

And so a tracery
emerges from the past
It emanates it draws together
intersects conjoins segments
a tessellation  map-rich

by and through and which
(bathed in the snow-light
of an uncurtained morning)
together we move now too and fro
in this still-experimental  passion

I think of you
When the sky is early blue
As it was this morning

I think of you
With this tenderness
You’ve given me to know

I think of you
In your single bed
Asleep even now

I think of you
Waking to the sound of the sea
To the breakfast voices of children

I think of you
Your quiet body
Folded against my own

I think of you
My front to your back
My heart beating against you

I think of you
Turning over and holding me
In the still warmness of sleep

I think of you
Loving me in your waking
As I love you now in this writing

I think of you
Though far away
So very close

It is that time before bed
When the day says stop
But still there are things to do
 
As talk and chat winds down
We give our attention
To the News and Weather
 
As couples do before bed
Before the sorting of cats
Locking the doors
 
Before going upstairs
To brush teeth and
Peek at the children
 
(Oh the way the heart’s
love leaps as
the landing-light falls
 
on those dear faces -
sleep gathering in
what the day has grown)
_______
 
Now the promise
Of bed’s lamplight
The click of the switch
 
And the slow radiance
Of the low-energy bulb
Spreading across pillows
 
Into the shadows where
As I lie in bed and melt
you remove your clothes
 
Such careful unbuttoning
before the limbs’ balletic
Moves in sequence
 
Pull-up draw-down
Shed-off  un-hook
Drop fold pile place
 
A jigsaw of curved forms
coming together
in a dance of shadows
 
And now the final gesture
When if naked or not you
Stoop to pull the cover back
 
In exquisite shudder
Your *******
Fall and sway
 
As the smooth fruit
Of your beauty’s
Tree is revealed

Time stretches into this long month
with its longer days moving toward
a forbidding future and
disconcerting present.
Unsure what news will break
now the truce of Christmas
is been, has gone, when only
remnants of that incarnation
remain in the continuing tale
of escape, genocide, return,
and those revelations
at the temple, allowing
Simeon to depart in peace
according to thy word.

This is how it is,
with no going back
to the kitchen candlelight,
to the fragrant scents
of food and friendship.
Whilst yesterday . . .
in a city street
a young woman begged
the cost of a sleeping bag,
hers stolen, and she,
hardly dressed for a cold day,
was gracious in her thanks
for my loose change given
when I had the means:
to see to her needs
in order to survive;
to see to her needs
in order to be human.

Sometimes poetry doesn’t happen. One needs more space to work things out, to play around with what you’ve got until you know it well, have felt its worth, weighed it up and reckoned it.

You go somewhere a little known. The location is not a complete surprise, but time and circumstance newly fashion its affect. Is it really eight years since last you were here? Then it was late autumn, now it’s summer’s end.

It’s sad my driving worries you. You drive with me, in a state of constant anticipation, making sure the speed is legal, the line of car to the road is straight. Often, your left hand reaches involuntarily for the door-handle restraint. The more I try to be steady, the worse it seems to become. But today I hand you the keys before you can ask: so that we may start this journey well. Since early morning the sun has shone, and as we head north the clouds assume great floating forms, magisterial, ermine-cloaked.

I like to watch you when you drive. I think it’s the pleasing proportion of your seated self, the body and limbs often motionless in their purposeful position. I look at your profile, the flow of your hair hiding your ears, the cleft and point of your chin, your nose I love to stroke with my nose, the wide mouth whose lips don’t fit my lips when we kiss, and this morning a warm glow on your left cheek.

We have become so careful you and I, with what we say and the way we say it. Politeness, attention to detail, purposeful decision-making, we both make allowances, keeping the conversation airborne, the tone steady, the content ‘of interest’.

After ninety miles it’s good to get out the car, good to get out in a village now bypassed by the main road, a quiet place. A church rises above the village and like a former coaching inn next to its gates faces down a wide street of 18C houses. Scattered variously there are a few unusual shops – wooden toys and metalled stoves. Here we prepare for the next stage of this journeying. On bicycles we’ll take minor roads to the coast.

At the top, after a steep climb out of the village, there it is: the sea. Since childhood that sighting moment has remained special. There’s a lifting of the spirit. The day remains fine, but a cool wind from the land is soon at our backs (you take care not to be cold and wear a scarf around your neck and ears). After just a few miles, we turn gratefully onto a very minor road where cycling becomes a pleasure. Passing vehicles are occasional and we are not continually pressed hard to the kerbside by speeding traffic. We could ride companionably side-by-side, but we don’t.

There is time to look about, to take in the dip and fold of fields and hedges, the punctuating farms and their ribbons of road. A fine manor house rises out of a forest of trees climbing in coniferous ranks to a limestone escarpment. On the breast of a hill we come upon a tapering stone tower that assumes the point from which the rolling landscape’s perspective flows. There’s a combine at the edge of a field and later its grain ‘tender’ heavy-laden meets us on a narrow bend. At a former mill a weir, where the greenest of green shade over water is too vivid not to photograph. Passing a row of cottages an elderly couple, sitting on their front porch, smile at our friendly wave. Above, swallows dart and spin.

A main road interrupts this idyll, and after a long straight ride with the sea a distant backdrop, we arrive at a coastal village overwhelmed by its recumbent castle. Lunch is eaten in a quiet corner of an ancient churchyard. Crows gather on the stubble in an adjacent field. We sit on a bench in the sunshine, though a cloudy afternoon beckons in the west. Later inside the church, where one of the northern saints is laid to rest, an unsteady light plays variously across the stone statues of the sanctuary.

Distance and a head wind begin to strain the calm confidence of the morning. Perhaps we have come too far and expect too much of ourselves? It is cheering though to beat the rain back to the car six miles hence.

Ten miles further up the coast the tide has retreated across a horizon-reaching expanse of sand and mud; it leaves a narrow causeway to an island beyond. It is a long way to its disappointing village full of car-borne visitors, attendant dogs and tired children. There, a little apart from these tourists, we sit to look out upon a further but tiny island where another northern saint found solitude. Wading into the cold sea he would face the setting sun as it fell into the folds of distant hills: to pray until dawn.

You are so tired when we reach the hotel. You are so tired. Our en suite room holds an enormous bed and a large long bath. From its window just a slice of sea can be seen in a gap between houses. I insist, for your sake, on immediate food and soon the strain on your pale, day-worn face begins to disappear and some colour returns as you eat. I catch your eyes smiling – for a brief moment. Oh, your green eyes, my undoing, so full of a sadness I have never fathomed. How often my memory returns to another room where one afternoon, newly married, we were the dearest lovers. In its strange half-light I caressed your long nakedness over and over, my hands and body visiting every part of you – and your dear face full of peace and joy.  

As dusk falls we walk down the village’s only street to view the sand and sea. Then to bed and hardly a page turned before you seek the sleep you need. I soak gratefully in the large bath. After engaging in a ‘difficult’ book for a few minutes, I soon turn off my light. But I am restless and the bed is hard. So I begin to reassemble the day moment-by-moment, later to dream strangely and sporadically until dawn breaks.

Sometimes poetry doesn’t happen
Until you’ve fashioned what you want to say
And felt its worth in prose.

You go somewhere a little known
But time newly fashions its affect.
Late autumn then, today summer’s end.

Since early morning the sun has shone.
Heading north, the clouds magisterial.
Spread themselves, ermine-cloaked.

I watch you as you drive:
The pleasing proportions of your seated self,
a warm glow on your left cheek.

We have become so careful you and I
With what we say and the way we say it.
Hard to keep the conversation aloft.

After ninety miles it’s good to get out
In a by-passed village, a quiet place.
Bicycles now take us towards the ancient coast.

There it is: the sea. The spirit lifts.
Wind at our backs and grateful to turn
to the pleasure of a minor road.

Now there’s time to take in a distant manor,
the swallows’ dart and spin, a stone tower
from which the landscape’s perspective flows.

A long straight road runs to a coastal village.
Lunch is eaten against a churchyard wall.
As a cloudy afternoon beckons, crows gather.

Turning east will the headwind strain
The morning’s calm confidence? Perhaps.
Have we come too far and expect too much?

At the causeway now, where the tide has left
The horizon-reaching expanse of mud and sand,
It seems a long road to the village at the island’s end.

Briefly, we sit to contemplate a yet further isle
Where, facing the sun’s fall into the folds
of distant hills, a northern saint found solitude.

So tired at the hotel I insist on immediate food
And soon the tension of the day falls from your face
And briefly I catch a smile from your eyes.

Memory returns me to another room where, newly married,
I caressed your long nakedness in a strange half-light,
My hands and body visiting every part of you.

As dusk falls we walk briefly to view the sand and sea.
Then bed and hardly a page turns before seeking sleep.
Restless, I reassemble the day, moment by moment.

Just when there seems nothing more could be said . . .*
 
a texture on your cheek appears,
a smudge of gold, brown, gold
catching a yellow fleck in the left eye,
your flower of an eye
that opens like an optometrist’s dream:
a restful knowing eye.
 
A distinct touch moves
on my forearm’s hair,
- tints of gold, freckled brown -
Up and down.
Up and down.
A warm wind
sways the barley field,
the sun setting.
 
I let just-audible words
stroke and calm,
stroke and calm
your tired, unsettled mind
wrestling with thoughts of those
who know you as someone
you may no longer be.
 
In my arms you remake
this newly-discovered self,
your self with an intent to be
who you know you are.
You gather strength.
You gather resolve.
 
We sit on the shadowed grass
and make love with kisses
so eloquent our tongues
construct words,
a whole lexicon beyond
any passion our bodies
could invent.
 
Our tongues curl and dance.
Our tongues curl and dance,
touching lips.
Touching lips.

Fukiko had woken before her accustomed time. She was alone and would have prefered to sleep, and sleep on until Narumi had lit the brazier in her room and brought tea. But she had woken, and was aware that outside the world had changed. The world, her world of Yukiguni, where the mulberry fibres for paper-making were laid out in the snow-bleached fields. Her world where men from the cities sought the kind of woman she was, a woman uncultured in the ways of geisha, but possessing a freedom no city-bred geisha could possess. She had been schooled by an aunt, was accomplished as a performer on the samisen and though her voice was thin, it held a quality of understanding, it had a fine texture, though thin. And yes, this morning a change had come over the world outside her small house that looked over Hikachi Lake, that looked towards the southern flank of the Central Mountains where during the previous day and night the snows from across the seas had fallen on the landscape. She imagined the roofs of the monastery across the lake were heavily white, and as she sought the image in her mind’s eye so the large brass bell of the temple sounded, no, it throbbed across what she knew would now be hard-frozen water.

I am floating she thought, like the snowflakes I glimpsed in the reflected lamplight when last night I opened the shutters for a moment before bed, before sleep and descent into my dreams. For days now she had been dreaming like never before. She seemed to enter a dreamstate; she would then wake purposefully; she would then fall instantly into quite a different world; over and over this seemed to happen until she found herself wondering if she was dreaming within a dream; she would become aroused, her skin glowing with the ministrations of hidden hands and fingers; she would feel that presence on her upper thighs, a kind of perspiration born of that ****** sensation that, when awake, would sometimes steel upon her.

The coming of the deep snows before spring was always a delight, an excitement carried her from childhood. The way its coming turned daily life upside down. She would enjoy choosing her very warmest garments, the bringing together of layers, her rabbit-skin mantle perhaps, a bright warm scarf over her hair, which she would not today ‘put up’ but allow to flow comfortably next to and down her back, then the hood only if the snow and the wind persisted. She could tell from the warmth of her bed that this was not so, that outside there was a stillness. Even the birds were subdued. Only the brass bell broke the stillness born of this deep snow of spring.

She heard Narumi rise, heard her **** in her chamber ***, heard her roll her bedding away, heard her bring the stove into life and fill her mistress’ brazier with the few precious coals brought across the mountains. There would be tea soon, and this young girl, appointed by her aunt to her charge, would appear to kneel beside Fukiko and give the morning blessing her mother had given Narumi since infancy. Then, she would say, ‘Madam, the snow is deep this morning. We are bound in snow today. Our path has disappeared.’ Still a child’s voice, and still a child at thirteen winters, such a slight girl. And she would retire to the warmth of the kitchen and Fukiko’s cat who was not allowed into her mistress’ presence unless requested.

Fukiko could feel the warmth from the brazier. It was as comforting as the thought of the silent snowscape outside. Gathering her cloak around her, kneeling on the covers of her bed, she held the bowl of tea in her hands, letting its warmth caress her fingers. Standing up, she stroked herself as though to bring her body awake - her flanks, the front of her thighs, her stomach, her slight *******, the long curve of her bottom and then the back of her thighs, her right hand stroking her left arm, her left arm stroking her right arm from shoulder to fingers. She was awake, and placing her feet on the cold matting found her night cloak of deepest blue with the ornamental sash of red and white. She would open the shutter and gaze out into this fresh world of snow and light.

It seemed quite miraculous that a covering of snow could so change this view across the lake to the monastery and its attendant village and then to the mountains beyond. She had once seen a woodcut of this scene, in snow, and had been mesmerised by what it revealed. Despite her status, her profession, such as it was, any ambition she might have harboured to dwell in a city, evaporated at this vista, this snow country scene. It was as though she was living in a story book where she could imagine herself as a concubine of some favoured lord, even better, a princess groomed for a fine marriage, a marriage she knew she would be unlikely to experience. There was one, a land-owner beyond Huchin whose business brought him past her domain, who, widowed and childless, had been advised to seek her presence. And she had been charmed by his shyness, his lack of experience with such as the woman she was, or thought she had to be. And it was often that she would find herself thinking of his presence, and imagining her body melting to his careful touch.

Suddenly, out on the lake figures moved. Was the hard frost of the last week really able to sustain figures on the ice? The brothers from the monastery were tentatively moving too and fro, they were suketo, skating. She would summon Narumi. Her girl should see this sight. The brothers in their crimson robes moving to and fro across the ice, their robes flowing. ‘Narumi’, Fukiko said, ‘a sight so rare. Come and look, the monks are skating.’

So Fukiko and Narumi opened wide the shutters and let in the whole landscape, the lake, the monastery, the snow-roofed village, the mountains beyond into the room. The snowlight dazzled, the hard cold air rushed into the warm room filling its very corners with an enervating freshness. Narumi knelt beside the brazier in her best purple cloak, her hair already pinned for the day, her eyes wide at the sight of these figures dancing with movement on the ice. Although cold, Fukiko would not pull herself away from this play of forms, this wholly pleasurable sight. Just below her window her camellia bushes were in bud, almost budding, their dark redness, bloodlike, enhanced by the vivid snow white. And then the bamboo, snow on the bamboo, as though carefully layered on the fragile stems and branches. This morning no wind and a period of snow falling that had laid flake upon flake upon flake giving the bamboo a wholly different form and weight and body. Its stems bent as though in supplication, as though in prayer to bless the landscape of this snow country.

One must bend
In the floating world -
Snow on bamboo

Kaga no Chivo (1701-55)

We’d been to concert at the Town Hall. It was a Saturday night and still early for a Saturday Night Out. So many people on the streets. The girls barely dressed, the boys bouncing around in t-shirts. Older people threaded along the pavements walking purposefully, but ‘properly’ dressed, and now making their way, as we were, for the station.

I know He noticed her because He stopped, momentarily. We were holding hands. He loves to hold my hand. That evening I remember squeezing his hand firmly as if to say how pleased I was He was here and I was not walking to the station alone. I have done this, walking to the station alone, so often. It is good to have someone close at such times, someone to talk to about the performance, the music, what is going on around us. We walked right past them.

I noticed the man first and then the child. He was very tall, very dark, wearing a black leather jacket I think. He was not scruffy so much as untidy, dark and untidy, with curly hair that did not know a comb. He was busking. He sang an incomprehensible song in a language I didn’t recognize, playing an electric guitar plugged into a small amplifier by his feat. He turned from side to side as he sang as though looking for an audience. I remember his trainers and the soft guitar case open on the pavement with a smattering of coins. Then, this child.

Over the last two days I’ve examined the scene in my memory. I’ve sought to recall as much as I can about this little girl. She was not that little I think for her age, perhaps seven or eight. Stocky. Thick golden brown hair. A sensible skirt covering her knees, a fawn jumper with some sparkly decoration. Tights or long socks perhaps. Proper shoes. I keep examining my mind’s photo. What I recall most vividly was her large smiling eyes and her expression. This is my daddy, it said. He’s singing and I’m here looking after him. I’m his smiley girl here on the city street. It’s late. Other children back home would be in bed, but I’m here smiling at the people passing.

Yesterday we talked about this couple, the little girl mostly. He brought the subject up. He’d been thinking about her too. He’d been puzzling over the two of them. As a pair they seemed so physically different, hardly father and daughter. It was the (possible) daughter’s gaze, her twinkling eyes that had spoken to him - as they had spoken to me. This is my daddy, those eyes and that smiley face had said. And she was holding a bear.

Why did I not mention the bear until now? Of course, she was holding her bear. She had both arms around her bear. She was hugging her bear to herself. It was a mild evening for March – she wore no coat. He looked a good bear, not too old or small, not the kind of bear she’d been given in infancy, perhaps recently acquired but well-loved, well-hugged. A bear that seemed entirely right for her age, for her slightly old fashioned clothes. The sort of clothes I might have worn as a child. I think of a photo of me at that age dressed in a Cloth-Kits dress, with an Alice band, with glasses and lots of curly hair.  

He said ‘I’ve been wondering about the two of them. Did they have a home? Where would they go to when it became late?’ Was there a mother? Was she working somewhere on that Saturday night and the father had to take the girl. Was she wearing her best clothes? She looked OK. A glowing, healthy face, a face that reflected the bright, coloured lights of the city street.’

Suddenly, I realised there were tears in his eyes. I thought, He is imagining a story. He is imagining a story of this seven year old who should have been tucked up in bed with her bear, like my little boy with his blue blanket. He was imagining her life., her past in some Eastern European town, where she went to school, where she had friends and relatives, where she had been born and brought up, and been loved. And now the girl was here in this not so distant city. Perhaps illegally, without the papers, smuggled in as so many are. Her father, swarthy, even a tinge of the Roma perhaps, but she so different. It was the golden brown hair. Thick hair, a ribbon tied in it. A pink ribbon.

He had thought of his little girl, now fifteen, only when she was that age, seven. Oddly similar in some ways, the thick hair, the smiley face, a different but ever present bear, an infant’s bear, not a bear she’d take with her except in a bag. A bear not to be seen with at seven, but loved.

‘I’ll call her Katya,’ He said. The girl, not the bear.

And later He did. Every few days He would mention her – just in passing. ‘Do you think Katya’s  at school today?’ ‘I was in the city this afternoon, but I didn’t see Katya.’

He wrote about her and her father. A little story. I haven’t read it. He just told me He’d written it; He’d thought of following them in his imagination. He was a little embarrassed telling me this, and He didn’t offer to show me the story, which is unusual because when He mentions He’s written something He usually does. And so I wonder. I wonder how long this memory will stay with him and whether He will follow this couple (and her bear) into the future, create a story for them to live in.

Perhaps it will bring him the peace He does not have. The peace I try to give him when He is with me at home and we sit in my little house, at my table eating toast with Marmite after I’ve been out late whilst He’s sat on my settee and read – in peace at being in my home. I know He feels cast adrift from his family and He can’t be part of mine, yet a while. Perhaps it’s like being in another country. Perhaps He thinks, at least that busker had his child with him, his shining star, his ever-smiley girl.

Yet He is thinking of his smiley girl, smiley still at fifteen, still loving her dad despite what He’s done, despite the fact that she sees him so seldom. Despite the fact that He is only occasionally with her, and she knowing I, his lover, his young woman, his companion and friend, has captured his heart and thoughts.

I think of Katya too. I think of my older girl, so loved and circled about with love and admiration by her respective families and our friends. She is so special and so beautiful, as I was special at eleven, as I think I was beautiful at eleven, just on the brink of that transformation that will take her towards becoming a teenager – and the rest.  

We were lying in bed the Saturday morning before seeing Katya and I was telling him about my childhood. He’d asked me about zebra finches. Walking in his nearby park He had admired their bright red beaks in the park’s newly-restored aviary. I told him about a parrot in a park close to my childhood home, a parrot I passed as I went to school. I described for him my walk to school, meeting up with my friends, passing the parrot. I know how happy it made him to hear me talk about such things. He said so later, embracing me in the kitchen. ’I so love to hear you talk about your childhood.’ I could feel he was moved to say this. It was important. I realised then just how deeply he loved me. That it was important. That he imagined me as a child. That He wanted to know that part of me. He’s rarely asked about the stuff in between. Of my former lovers I’ve said a little. He has said a little about his past liaisons and affaires, but knows I am uncomfortable when he does. So we leave this. But childhood, That’s so different, because it is that precious, precious time of shelter and care: when we begin to discover who we are and who and what we love.

Where is Katya now? In a messy room she shares with her parents in a house shared with economic migrants, where she has a few belongings in three plastic bags. In one, her best clothes she wears to stand on the city street on a Saturday night with her daddy. In another a jumble of not so clean clothes she rotates each day. She has her sleeping bag, her bear, her warm coat and gloves. There’s a few magazines she’s found about the house. English is puzzling. She learnt a little at school back home, and from the TV of course, those American soaps. If she was here in my house I would stand her in the shower, wash her thick hair, put her clothes in the machine, sit her on my bed in my daughter’s clothes with some picture books, introduce her to my cats, we would bake some buns. I would give her a small gift of my love to take away with her and she would look on me with her smiley face, her sparkling eyes and let me hold her bear.

And later when I saw him I would tell him that Katya had been with me for a little, and tears would fall, mine and his, knowing that only in our dreams could we make this so.

I dreamt my tower before my tower
Arose from oak-treed woods,
And standing far above a sparkling sea
Providing welcome space: a home
From where to think, compose,
Be quite alone.

When becalmed by night, the youngest girl
Of three and yet *****, I sat and pondered
Many silent hours, the house quite still,
(No music sounding out, or I to give it sound)
And sitting so did spin a future for myself:
A castle-keep upon a point of wooded land
With sea to either side and hills behind,
No, mountains surely, and across the water
A sprinkle of isles all shapes and hues,
Their aspect changing hour on hour.

It was not arranged that we should meet,
'Twas a love match made by Cupid’s hand.
At Mrs Morran’s weekly dance he came,
The second son, a slim, dark soul,
Rich in silence and sharp looks
He did at once unlock my heart, so seated
At the instrument my hands did briefly
Falter at the keys to see him frown then look
When I began a *Menuet from Playford’s book.
I sang, but now cannot remember what,
My voice seemed strangely not my own,
But distant, far away and lacking tone.

Faining not to dance he later came and spoke
Of Mr Handel whom he’d lately seen and heard
On that great man’s brief sojourn in our city.
Masterly playing, he said, rich in invention
And delight. You know his work? Oh yes I cried,
Of course, of course I play his keyboard Canzonets
Until my sisters scold me and my finger sore
With trills and turns and ornaments apace
Such grace this music . . . and he laughed.

Six months later we were wed,
He, a most Honourable son by birth,
I, his Lady came to be.
Through music our love begat
An heir then daughters three
Before five years had passed.
And then . . .
With swiftness hardly comprehending
He became the heir and Laird
Of 20,000 acres in Bendeloch, Mid Lorn,
His father and his brother dead, their ship
The Coral foundering in Atlantic storms.
And so did Lochnell, newly built,
Become our home, its policies
******* broad Archmucknisk Bay
That favoured to the west the Isle of Mull
and to the north Argyll and Bute.

As children grew and wifely obligations
Changed I became again a dreaming soul
Returned by degrees to that first love,
My music, that had brought to me such joy,
Affection, happiness, delight.
My husband busy with affairs abroad,
I filled the house with Mr Handel’s
Strains and finding I could improvise
Upon his grounds, discovered too
That I had tunes a’plenty, and not only
In my fingers, but in my restless mind.
Whilst other ladies write and paint
I scribe the symbols of my art, and then
In music’s script composed and scored
To paper with a draughtsman’s pen.

Each day I went to seek my muse,
Would find her form in nature’s grace.
My garden walled in granite stone
Held leafy treasures safe from wind and storm.
But ascending thence through oak woods
To peninsulary heights I glimpsed afar
A fine, majestic view towards the Highland
Ranges so rich in Gaelic names (and oft in May
Still topped with ice and snow).
Such sublimity I felt when gazing
On the aspect of these distant hills
That music came unbidden to my waiting hand
And, returning to my study, I would play and write
My manuscripts till late at night.

My husband smiled at such full-fancied thought
Then hid from me a brave intent and plan.
Whilst away one spring we travelled south
To Venice and Milan, he ordered built
A tower to rise above the trees
With winding stair and tiny chamber
At its top where my small clavichord
might rest and furnish me with
With gentle sounds to speak of music
On the very peak of Gardh Ards.

Arriving home in burnished autumn’s wake
He led me to the very top, and there
Above the forest sward, rose up a tower,
A tower from whose fine granulated heights
A Lady who wrote music might imbibe
A richer view, and then in silent meditation
Take from landscape’s glory all and more.
And so inscribed upon a plaque reads
*Erected for Lady Campbell anno 1754.

it was as if every day
might be the last
he would wake in the night
with help me on his lips
but too late he thought
too late

I am beyond help
because I have selfishly ignored
both reason and right
and now I must take this life
apart

he was surprised at the calm
this realisation engendered
he would carry on from day to day
attempting small acts of kindness
being patient with his wife
his children his few friends

to the woman he loved
out of all mind he had only
admiration felt only tenderness
and hoped she would know this
to be true despite what he knew
he had to do

Waking in the night
I could hear the wind
Whoosh against the window
Cold air brush my cheek

Rising later the trees outside
Were turmoil-tossed whereas
Only the day before had stood
Frozen still leaf-bound

With pavements covered
In the park the chestnut avenue
Has spread before it a carpet
Of red of gold across the grass

In the before-sun light
Leaves fall are falling
Turning wrapped in cold wind
Tossed everywhichway

No way back they are leaving
Summer’s home Spring’s promise
To lie beyond symmetry
And reason’s eye.

I

You’re higher up on a train so the flatness the far horizons the empty fields the ***** disappearing into the distance solitary houses set amongst windbreaks of trees and surrounded by the loam-rich fields the serious machinery turning or drilling the earth raised levies of a distinctive green birds gathering notating music on telegraph wires suddenly a mumuration of starlings undulating wave-like in the drab mouse-grey skies arching and over this train riding perched above the land and now acres of water not a lake flooded land gradually tapering towards a sprawling city all but hidden by its hill-less topography

II

Smash! the percussionist wipes his hands and grabs another bottle before the music escapes checking his fingers for cuts and kicking the broken glass from his feet It was a brilliant though unplanned moment we all agreed and will remember this concert always for that particular accidental smile-inducing sharp intake of breath moment when with a Fanta bottle in each hand there was a joyful hit and scrape guiro-like on the serrated edges a no-holes barred full-on sounding out of glass on glass and you just loved it when he drank the juice and fluting blew across the bottle’s mouth

III

It’s the other side of town past and running the gauntlet of the shops we’d love to stop and look Don’t lets That’s for later Now it’s the house we’ve come to see four narrow cottages joined as one hard to believe the inside from the outside Oh that lemon on the pewter plate Ben’s drawing beneath the windowsill you had to kneel to look at The long table surfaces decorated with stones shells wood on shelves of the right books and the right chairs to read them in we sat still I sketching you in the grey fading light

IV

Suddenly the brightness of the adjoining gallery a dozen paintings nothing here of the interstellar abstract chilly world of the ellipse where she failed to make a home preferring to make a cup of tea alongside a growing bud and the tissued plants the gathered flowers in a chapel niche the white saxifrage of the Highlands and washed out colours of Bamburgh’s beaches then suddenly a child and that life-size photo a tall girl hair braided painterly somewhere in the Italian lakes her obsessive colour chart searching for the unknown purple she had once glimpsed with her father in India

V

Turning away from the temptation of town to walk in twilight viewing the warm lights from the ancient buildings those enclosures of chapel library refectory student rooms fellows’ chambers offices guarded by men in bowler hats whose occupants cross courtyard and cloister purposefully sometimes gowned (for the tourists perhaps) those cobbled passages the tall chimneys the gates and railings suddenly back in the busy streets bicycles everywhere tea necessary tea I catch the fatigue in your face time for apple strudel and jasmine infusion with a view of the chapel it took a hundred years and three Henrys to build.

VI

Choristers have a special way of walking in their robes swish they go as they make that 90 degree turn to enter the Choir the layclerks play this down but will forget themselves and swish the gown flies out Decani and Cantores go their separate ways to stand by their candles bow towards the altar the introit Oh Lord, I Lift My Heart to Thee by Orlando Gibbons a choir man in this very place 1596-8 knowing the echo well wrote accordingly hard not to tremble as the music floats to the stone vaulting a 170 feet above our heads

VII

Famous as a thespian kindergarten plays abound and tonight there’s six to see We enter an L shaped room with the stage at the right angle a sitting room with a green sofa a door to a bathroom a knitting basket on the coffee table four characters (and a bump) with two penguins (one disguised as another – real - hiding in the bathroom) there was even a piece of Battenberg cake on our seat to eat make of that what you will we did and laughed though not without the occasional poignant lump in the throat a tear in the eye

VIII

You sit with your back to a mirror so I practice smiling aware of the pleasure your bright face brings me constantly this warmth of your company the tilt of your head your cheeks’ glow the sweet cadences of your voice though tired food and wine revive It won’t be too late after the brisk walk back through the brightly lit streets forever letting our hands come apart then re-engage to manage the pavements and throngs of Friday evening so much today so much to take to bed my love your beauty nightdressed in white to my surprise and pleasure

IX

Oh this gradual coming together as sleep lifts away from bodies resting just apart but then a little turn on the pillow knees touch there is the slightest kiss of a nose a mingling of feet hands may rest atop a thigh and touch experimentally This is such bliss all consuming no thought but each body’s press and caress so slightly so gently given until hands and limbs and kisses and the dearest stroking fills us to the brim with that longing which only the deeper kiss can quench Afterwards we watch from our attic bedroom leaves departing their trees

X

The steep steps and Doric pillars eight in all gather us into an entranced gloom only to spill us out into the light and space of galleries filled with Cyprian artefacts an owl with a removable head more porcelain than even your great aunt could look at but in a corner there were these bowls from Syria 12C and earlier Michael Cardew could have thrown and patterned but didn’t One in Iranian green inscribed thus blessing prosperity glory grace joy happiness security and long life to the owner  nothing more surely ever to be wished for ever to be wanted

XI

My Chinese heroine has a soulmate: Jilia’s deer in flight across a page of Somerset Soft White and Tengin mould oh the verse of Hafiz 14C Sufi mystic flowing into the body of this running beast Rejoice you lonely seeker of the scented path out of the wilderness the perfumed deer has come and there was more in different hands paper parchment poems exquisitely rendered into living words In a frame Goethe’s leaves of the Gingo Biloba stuck to his letter of love to married Marianne This leaf from a tree in the East has been given to my garden

XII

Captivating in beauty glowing silvery-white petals flutter down to lay a blanket of snow beneath the flowering trees and miraculously they did and more to make us wonder that negative space could be so powerfully wrought Hiroshige the master in his element of the winter snows eloquent landscapes figures on the Edo to Kyoto road the detail of raised up clogs and warm layered garments of a Geisha walking out with her maid the stone blue waters the pale reflecting skies the delicate embossing of waves and the flow of hillsides the ukiyo-e woodblock prints pictures of the floating world

XIII

Wearing purple and red your near to Advent colours grace this table we lunch at before a final walk through the city full of our time here amongst the towers and chapels and more history and art than we can manage for the time being Again and always whelmed over by your beauty seen against the press and clutter the clustering in the peopled streets the bicycled roads and in this one o’clock restaurant’s clamour how is it that my eyes are wholly on you my ears only hearing your sweet voice my fingers reaching out to touch you again?

As he walked through the maze of streets from the tube station he wondered just how long it had been since he had last visited this tall red-bricked house. For so many years it had been for him a pied à terre. Those years when the care of infant children dominated his days, when coming up to London for 48 hours seemed such a relief, an escape from the daily round that small people demand. Since his first visits twenty years ago the area bristled with new enterprise. An abandoned Victorian hospital had been turned into expensive apartments; small enterprising businesses had taken over what had been residential property of the pre-war years. Looking up he was conscious of imaginative conversions of roof and loft spaces. What had seemed a wide-ranging community of ages and incomes appeared to have disappeared. Only the Middle Eastern corner shops and restaurants gave back to the area something of its former character: a place where people worked and lived.

It was a tall thin house on four floors. Two rooms at most of each floor, but of a good-size. The ground floor was her London workshop, but as always the blinds were down. In fact, he realised, he’d never been invited into her working space. Over the years she’d come to the door a few times, but like many artists and craftspeople he knew, she fiercely guarded her working space. The door to her studio was never left open as he passed through the hallway to climb the three flights of stairs to her husband’s domain. There was never a chance of the barest peek inside.

Today, she was in New York, and from outside the front door he could hear her husband descend from his fourth floor eyrie. The door was flung open and they greeted each other with the fervour of a long absence of friends. It had been a long time, really too long. Their lives had changed inexplicably. One, living almost permanently in that Italian marvel of waterways and sea-reflected light, the other, still in the drab West Yorkshire city from where their first acquaintance had begun from an email correspondence.

They had far too much to say to one another - on a hundred subjects. Of course the current project dominated, but as coffee (and a bowl of figs and mandarin oranges) was arranged, and they had moved almost immediately he arrived in the attic studio to the minimalist kitchen two floors below, questions were thrown out about partners and children, his activities, and sadly, his recent illness (the stairs had seemed much steeper than he remembered and he was a little breathless when he reached the top). As a guest he answered with a brevity that surprised him. Usually he found such questions needed roundabout answers to feel satisfactory - but he was learning to answer more directly, and being brief, suddenly thought of her and her always-direct questions. She wanted to know something, get something straight, so she asked  - straight - with no ‘going about things’ first. He wanted to get on with the business at hand, the business that preoccupied him, almost to the exclusion of everything else, for the last two days.

When they were settled in what was J’s working space ten years ago now he was immediately conscious that although the custom-made furniture had remained the Yamaha MIDI grand piano and the rack of samplers were elsewhere, along with most of the scores and books. The vast collection of CDs was still there, and so too the pictures and photographs. But there was one painting that was new to this attic room, a Cézanne. He was taken aback for a moment because it looked so like the real thing he’d seen in a museum just weeks before. He thought of the film Notting Hill when William Thacker questions the provenance of the Chagall ‘violin-playing goat’. The size of this Cézanne seemed accurate and it was placed in a similar rather ornate frame to what he knew had framed the museum original. It was placed on right-hand wall as he had entered the room, but some way from the pair of windows that ran almost the length of this studio. The view across the rooftops took in the Tower of London, a mile or so distant. If he turned the office chair in which he was sitting just slightly he could see it easily whilst still paying attention to J. The painting’s play of colours and composition compelled him to stare, as if he had never seen the painting before. But he had, and he remembered that his first sight of it had marked his memory.

He had been alone. He had arrived at the gallery just 15 minutes before it was due to close for the day.  He’d been told about this wonderful must-see octagonal room where around the walls you could view a particularly fine and comprehensive collection of Impressionist paintings. All the great artists were represented. One of Van Gogh’s many Olive Trees, two studies of domestic interiors by Vuillard, some dancing Degas, two magnificent Gaugins, a Seurat field of flowers, a Singer-Sergeant portrait, two Monets - one of a pair of haystacks in a blaze of high-summer light. He had been able to stay in that room just 10 minutes before he was politely asked to leave by an overweight attendant, but afterwards it was as if he knew the contents intimately. But of all these treasures it was Les Grands Arbres by Cézanne that had captured his imagination. He was to find it later and inevitably on the Internet and had it printed and pinned to his notice board. He consulted his own book of Cézanne’s letters and discovered it was a late work and one of several of the same scene. This version, it was said, was unfinished. He disagreed. Those unpainted patches he’d interpreted as pools of dappled light, and no expert was going to convince him otherwise! And here it was again. In an attic studio J. only frequented occasionally when necessity brought him to London.

When the coffee and fruit had been consumed it was time to eat more substantially, for he knew they would work late into the night, despite a whole day tomorrow to be given over to their discussions. J. was full of nervous energy and during the walk to a nearby Iraqi restaurant didn’t waver in his flow of conversation about the project. It was as though he knew he must eat, but no longer had the patience to take the kind of necessary break having a meal offered. His guest, his old friend, his now-being-consulted expert and former associate, was beginning to reel from the overload of ‘difficulties’ that were being put before him. In fact, he was already close to suggesting that it would be in J’s interest if, when they returned to the attic studio, they agreed to draw up an agenda for tomorrow so there could be some semblance of order to their discussions. He found himself wishing for her presence at the meal, her calm lovely smile he knew would charm J. out of his focused self and lighten the rush and tension that infused their current dialogue. But she was elsewhere, at home with her children and her own and many preoccupations, though it was easy to imagine how much, at least for a little while, she might enjoy meeting someone new, someone she’d heard much about, someone really rather exotic and (it must be said) commanding and handsome. He would probably charm her as much as he knew she would charm J.

J. was all and more beyond his guest’s thought-description. He had an intensity and a confidence that came from being in company with intense, confident and, it had to be said, very wealthy individuals. His origins, his beginnings his guest and old friend could only guess at, because they’d never discussed it. The time was probably past for such questions. But his guest had his own ideas, he surmised from a chanced remark that his roots were not amongst the affluent. He had been a free-jazz musician from Poland who’d made waves in the German jazz scene and married the daughter of an arts journalist who happened to be the wife of the CEO of a seriously significant media empire. This happy association enabled him to get off the road and devote himself to educating himself as a composer of avant-garde art music - which he desired and which he had achieved. His guest remembered J’s passion for the music of Luigi Nono (curiously, a former resident of the city in which J. now lived) and Helmut Lachenmann, then hardly known in the UK. J. was already composing, and with an infinite slowness and care that his guest marvelled at. He was painstakingly creating intricate and timbrally experimental string quartets as well as devising music for theatre and experimental film. But over the past fifteen years J. had become increasingly more obsessed with devising software from which his musical ideas might emanate. And it had been to his guest that, all that time ago, J. had turned to find a generous guide into this world of algorithms and complex mathematics, a composer himself who had already been seduced by the promise of new musical fields of possibility that desktop computer technology offered.

In so many ways, when it came to the hard edge of devising solutions to the digital generation of music, J. was now leagues ahead of his former tutor, whose skills in this area were once in the ascendant but had declined in inverse proportion to J’s, as he wished to spend more time composing and less time investigating the means through which he might compose. So the guest was acting now as a kind of Devil’s Advocate, able to ask those awkward disarming questions creative people don’t wish to hear too loudly and too often.

And so it turned out during the next few hours as J. got out some expensive cigars and brandy, which his guest, inhabiting a different body seemingly, now declined in favour of bottled water and dry biscuits. His guest, who had been up since 5.0am, finally suggested that, if he was to be any use on the morrow, bed was necessary. But when he got in amongst the Egyptian cotton sheets and the goose down duvet, sleep was impossible. He tried thinking of her, their last walk together by the sea, breakfast à deux before he left, other things that seemed beautiful and tender by turn . . . But it was no good. He wouldn’t sleep.

The house could have been as silent as the excellent double-glazing allowed. Only the windows of the attic studio next door to his bedroom were open to the night, to clear the room of the smoke of several cigars. He was conscious of that continuous flow of traffic and machine noise that he knew would only subside for a brief hour or so around 4.0am. So he went into the studio and pulled up a chair in front of the painting by Cézanne, in front of this painting of a woodland scene. There were two intertwining arboreal forms, trees of course, but their trunks and branches appeared to suggest the kind of cubist shapes he recognized from Braque. These two forms pulled the viewer towards a single slim and more distant tree backlit by sunlight of a late afternoon. There was a suggestion, in the further distance, of the shapes of the hills and mountains that had so preoccupied the artist. But in the foreground, there on the floor of this woodland glade, were all the colours of autumn set against the still greens of summer. It seemed wholly wrong, yet wholly right. It was as comforting and restful a painting as he could ever remember viewing. Even if he shut his eyes he could wander about the picture in sheer delight. And now he focused on the play of brush strokes of this painting in oils, the way the edge and border of one colour touched against another. Surprisingly, imagined sounds of this woodland scene entered his reverie - a late afternoon in a late summer not yet autumn. He was Olivier Messiaen en vacances with his perpetual notebook recording the magical birdsong in this luminous place. Here, even in this reproduction, lay the joy of entering into a painting. Jeanette Winterson’s plea to look at length at paintings, and then look again passed through his thoughts. How right that seemed. How very difficult to achieve. But that night he sat comfortably in J’s attic and let Cézanne deliver the artist’s promise of a world beyond nature, a world that is not about constant change and tension, but rests in a stillness all its own.

From the woodlands of Madagascar
To the highlands of Ethiopia
Dwell nine species of lovebirds.
Their genus name is Agapornis,
From the Greek agape (love) and ornis (birds).
The French call them Les inséperables

While affection between compatible pairs
Can be a joy to behold,
Lovebirds can be quite territorial
And will defend their nest.

Sexually dimorphic they mate for life.
Like all parrots they need to be well
Socialized and taken care of.
They  are very vocal, making loud
High-pitched noises, especially
In the early morning time.

Stocky little birds
With short blunt tails
You can hold them
In the palms of your hands.
They love to snuggle,
They love to preen.
Happy birds: together.

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.

When it comes to you
I can hardly help myself:
this not-thinking,
this avoidance of thought
because sense says so,
and all the rest say no,
let it be,
let it be this way
no matter what.
But, of course, reason
must prevail
and I am left alone
with only a last glimpse of you;
before the door slams,
before the train leaves.

He had sat at his desk with intent to write to her. And he had not. He had sat and let his mind wander. He wanted to write if only to capture something of her he had yet to capture. It was as though by trying to find words to describe her everyday self he discovered it was often extraordinary, and it filled him with more tenderness that he could reasonably deal with. The other day he had written her a letter. It was rather ordinary, full of unplanned thoughts and descriptions, a day-to-day letter, but he had written it by hand, taking care with the curl and mark of his pen on the little sheets of laser-copier paper he felt suited him best. Once he wrote expansively (though never to her) on large sheets of thick, fine paper with a calligraphic pen and Indian ink. Now he felt more comfortable with a fine roller-ball nib and a light touch, on paper of a dimension and quality that seemed appropriate to the size of his script.

Today, as he thought about the letter he might write, he had imagined her finding his most recent letter as she came home, a letter with his careful handwriting on the envelope. It would be lying on the doormat with the brown envelopes, the circulars, the bank statement and one of the many journals she subscribed to. There was a letter too from her ‘pen friend’, someone who had invited her to correspond having been so touched to find a late relative’s letters full of the minutiae of life, but properly described and not the ad hoc jottings of what now passes for communication on social media. So this friend, who was not then a friend but an acquaintance, had set out to recruit a group of like-minded people she might write to properly, in proper sentences – and had, it seemed, fixed on her. He had been a little jealous at first that she should write, and write properly to this ‘friend’ she hardly knew, and since then she had so very rarely written to him. He had so wanted her words, on paper and not just her end-of-the-day thoughts on the telephone. But he had soon got over this jealousy realising how valuable this letter, written once a fortnight, would be for her. An opportunity no less, of the kind and value he could no longer provide.

It had changed the way he had continued to write to her. He stopped the hand-written caress of a letter on paper and took up what he called the Ten-Minute Letter composed at the computer. Not an e-mail, but a proper letter as an attachment she could print out. Written each day just before he stopped for lunch, he set an alarm on his phone and wrote for ten minutes only until the sampled chimes of Big Ben struck. It was a challenge, and to meet it he would prepare his ‘daily subject’ in those transient moments between the demands of work and other people’s needs, as he walked to work or cooked supper. He felt that by doing this he would eradicate that falling into passionate contemplation, the downloading of his memory’s thoughts, his often-intense feelings and emotions. He thought she would prefer such brevity, as she now had so little time for reflection, except when travelling.

In imagining that picking up of his letter he sought to imagine further. Would she open it straight away? Would she put it at the bottom of the stairs on a pile of things to take up to her bedroom, and read before bed?  Occasionally there was  a little time stolen during the day when, before the necessity to go at her desk and ‘get on’, she would sit on her bed with her cats and be conscious of her physical self. She would think of him beside her, kneeling on the floor in one of those occasional preludes to their passionate moments she knew he so loved, when he was full of tenderness, and he would kiss and stroke her, their quiet voices caressing each other in the lamplight. He thought of her carefully pulling the envelope flap open without a tear (whereas he could hardly contain himself, when a letter did arrive, from pulling the envelope apart). And she would read his careful writing, his late afternoon thoughts written after a long day’s work, before returning to more time at his desk.

She would read quickly, rather impatiently sometimes. She had to ‘get on’, attack the list, get things done. But just occasionally he surprised her. He would catch her attention. There was some phrase, some reflection that made her feel warm and loved. He would make an observation about her, and she would feel treasured and honoured by his words and be grateful for the time he had put aside to write them. And then the letter would be returned to its envelope, placed on the bookshelf beside her bed, and she would feel secure that she was loved, and could then put all that away for now and ‘get on’. But just once in a while she would recall the pit-in-the-stomach thrill of his first letters, as letter by letter he declared himself, saying what he thought of her, what he felt for her. She was often overcome with his play of words and would touch herself to sustain those rich feelings that would gradually envelop her; that someone could care about her that much. And for a while she was transformed . . .

Today, as he continued to hold his pen away from composing that first sentence, he had wanted to return to writing of her and for her. It was his small gift, his almost once a day gift. With words he knew he was on safer ground. He struggled somewhat in his *******; he worried that he disappointed her with his awkwardness and never being sure if he was doing the right thing at the right time in the right way. Perhaps in reading his thoughts rather than responding to the messages of his physical self, she felt safer too. He wanted her to know something of the intensity that she brought to his ‘being aliveness’. He remembered a recent phone call when for once he seemed able to say pretty much what he meant. ‘I hope I don’t presume in saying,’ he had said, overtly formal as so often, ‘ that one of the reasons I think we are the companions we are is that we have so much in common; we love the same things, we share the same joys and pleasures.’ And she had agreed. He felt this was true, and he wanted to celebrate this somehow; but they were apart, being on the phone, and he could not. There was less and less time for the joy of coming together, of that celebration of being-together that had once seemed beyond magic and the stuff of dreams and fantasy. There was now the ever-present awareness of the clock, of having to do this, needing to do that, and at a certain time. Their life together was changing and he needed to rise to the challenge that this change would bring, no matter how busy and preoccupied she became. He would write, he thought, and tell her that he knew this would be so, that she should never be concerned for him if there wasn’t time. Hadn’t she said she loved him, this young woman who had once been so diffident about speaking such endearments? She had already given him so much that he never imagined he would ever receive. Perhaps not for always, he was so much older than her, but for a long time to come. He must acknowledge the receipt of such gifts, and let her know he loved her all the more for her industry, her ambition, her preoccupation, and the beautiful, gracious person she was.

The light and shade
of shadowed curves,
hidden places where
fingers search restlessly
for fresh points of touch,
there to inscribe the present
mysteries of our passion.

‘This is how it is,’
an inner voice explains,
‘You become so richly
entwined about.’

And there, that dear smell,
the swell and rub of flesh,
of our bodies’ confusion.
Whatever passes
into mind’s space
is pushed to the edge.
Empty yet all.

Like Kathleen
I have a poem
Coming on
Yet to be born
Waiting in darkness
For a moment of truth

Like Kathleen
I 've swept the floor
But haven’t darned the socks
Yet I made a cake instead
And cooked two meals
For the one I love

Like Kathleen
I'm hopelessly hopeless
In life in love and only
Survive each day
By welcoming
Blue green golden red

(so forgetting what the angel said)
I  sing
Like Kathleen
Words that in my blood
Stream over rocks
To the sea.

Dead thing
dismembered
prone on the sand
beyond the tide's line,
a torso of tree
amputated
of branches,
limb-free,
lying helpless
at the mercy
of the sea's reach.

I

You are not so far away
as before,
still in the same hemisphere,
but beyond
an hour on a train
you’ve flown,
hating, I know,
the thought and inevitable
fact, so I imagine
your wide eyes and cheeks pale,
wider, paler
as the engines change their roar
and the plane drops,
turns, floats, falls
through cushions of clouds
to bump and land
in light and colour
amidst a different spring.


II

The shutters drawn back
and the morning opens
on gnarled and twisted trees
set in a stone-strewn grove.
A working day before you,
and a cast of students
await your direction;
to play with making,
and being busy.
Like you I love
the business of learning
but struggle now with
the time is takes away;
time apart, time alone,
time with myself
without your presence
at the other end
of the studio table.



III

Upwards into the trees
the camera points,
and by the miracle
of mobile technology
a video captures
the lemon-yellow light
behind the olive trees
and in the foreground
its unmistakeable leaves.
Unmistakeable too
there’s the sound of your very breath,
a ground to the song of evening birds.
This inhalation I know,
as when sleepless in your bed
I wonder at the deepness of your slumber,
and the silent exhalation from your lips.


IV

Such a richness of lives and looks
come together at the dining table.
A perambulatory prosecco,
con cerignola e crostini
primes the sharing,
but when seated for
spigola del mare
scorza di arancio,
con timo e rosmarino,
it's tête à tête time,
until the Moscato d’Asti
arrives with the fracoli
e ricotta di picora to further fuel
more intimate questions and asides
only women (of a certain age) confide.
But in this Enchanted April
let Lottie be Alice who walks out
alone under the starry night
to say to herself (out loud)
‘the evening was lovely’.


V

My darling,
you have out figged me;
walking Paolo’s Poloma Gardens
beneath his many hundred trees.
I imagine Eve, when on her own,
could hardly leave alone
the texture and the shape of fig
recalling as it does what lies below
that gorgèd member
hard yet sweet  
to woman’s touch.
And Adam too,
when biting on the fig,
did in his tongue - taste
a semblance of love’s
deepest kiss when moving
toward pleasure’s
culmination and release.


VI

And so this the final day
of busy making,
walking in sunshine
weaving in shade,
the lizard and the olive press,
those plant-marked letters
pegged to dry, the sights
the smells, the sounds,
the thoughts . . .
How well your pictures
frame a happy time
whilst I, dear friend,
descend like Dante
where no pleasure lies
nor rest from worldly cares.
So chill and cold
this April has begun.
And I,
so lost without you
and your gentle,
guiding hand.

this space this place
a shelter from the weather
wind the rain unclothed
the deer would huddle
in habitual restlessness alert
except when in the forests’ deepest
dark their great pale eyes would close

today this sheltering of souls
does not escape the weather
but life’s maltreated pattern
its daily flux and disarray
to sit in this observatory
of evening sky’s condition
seeking only quiet and rapture

on high-backed benches
settled as giants enthroned
pale orange light above our heads
glows within an architrave
to reach across the funnelled
ceilinged surface to the aperture  -
a heightened vision of the sky

we close our eyes prayer-like
to meet our solitary self
where teeming thoughts begin
mind images stream
discarding all intent and reason
until we raise our lidded sight
to this single square of sky

travelling the past and triggered
by undetermined thoughts
speech ringing in the ears
words flood and spawn
so intense this skied perfection
we are drugged towards
a kind of sleep: time waits

then a wakefulness resumes
and all is sound spun turbulence
from trees above that calm and fill
replacing or confusing thought
inside the noise of rising wind: a single
oaken leaf is tossed within the chamber
where it skids and quivers at our feet

unlike the deer who lack imagination’s marvel
we take our thoughts outside this present space
this containment empty of distraction save ourselves
our so-slightly shifting hands buttocks heads limbs eyes
towards a nether world we have no words to share
the salient features of this dreamscape we might glimpse
that is ourselves: distinct alone apart beyond

slowly shifting colour from grey of day to blue of night
the small square accumulates ephemeral
memos sent from our seated selves perhaps
to fly with the wind-tossed crows to roost
somewhere in nearby trees we cannot see -
with the handshake of Friends the meeting ends
and out of silence shyly we reconnect with speech

She was very warm in bed except for her nose, which was more than cold, though not quite frozen. Her bear, who she had folded into her arms but as a prelude to pulling back the covers - no duvees here just scratchy blankets- she placed on her on the pillow. Jellikins was pink and not a proper bear for a nine year old. She'd been her bear since infancy, small and a bit grubby, and pink.
 
It was still quite dark, silent. She could see her dressing gown hanging on the door - just. There was a movement downstairs; her father making tea perhaps. This was his time of day, the early morning. For as long as she could remember he was up and often out when she woke. Even at Christmas, particularly at Christmas when she sought her mother's bed he was 'out', working or walking in the park . But here at the farm he was here, downstairs, and if she went down now he'd wrap her in a blanket or two and read to her until the light changed through the kitchen window on to the yard, a gradual blueness, then, if it was a clear day she'd watch the sun draw itself from the sea in a golden ball.
 
She loved it when he read, because he loved to read, and because he loved to read to her, holding her gently in his arms, she would drift off into her own thoughts. Being out with dogs on the cliff paths, the smell of the Christmas tree at home that her mother would decorate tonight, being on the train for six hours with picnicy food, game after game of Go and those strange  word puzzles her father would invent , then the cycle ride with the big downhill rush to Morfyn and the long long push up Rhiw hill in the twilight . . .
 
Later, after their first breakfast they'd go out into the frozen yard and let the dogs out. Into the old sheds with their simple wooden latches hand-smoothed requiring the barest touch to open; then **** and his mum bounding out, and the little dogs yapping and yapping. Next, to barn and with the knife she'd been trusted with, she waited for the bales to land at her feet, flying out of the darkness up high near the roof. Cutting the baler twine and stuffing it in her coat pocket she opened out the compressed straw ready for Blossom and her friends to munch and scrunch, **** and **** their way through their breakfast.
 
On a farm the opening and closing of gates was like a little ceremony. Always the same careful ordering of movement; you could only open this gate if you'd closed that . . . you always checked the tail of the chain was the whole way through the loop and secure.
 
Meanwhile proper morning had arrived: it had been dark, now it was light, properly morning time. She could move all ten beasts on her own, from the Plas field across the yard to the Stack and back again - four gates each way and never a slip.
 
She had read at school that the beasts spoke to each other on Chrismas Eve, at the moment of the birth, when this baby was born in the stable. Although she doubted this just a little – Who had actually heard them? Was there  a recording perhaps? She wondered what they would say to each other tonight. Surely they spoke to each other all the time. Well, the beasts she knew mooed and grunted constantly. Was it just that we could understand them when suddenly it became Christmas? And how long could they talk for? Just a few minutes, or the rest of the night until the sun rose? She imagined herself opening her bedroom window at midnight to listen to them in the stack yard. She would look up at the sparkly sky, a sky that was so awesome that she and her father would, on a clear night, go up the mountain before bed and stand at the very top to look at the immense upturned bowl of the heavens rising out of the sea on three sides. At home the sky was just a red glow, occasionally the moon rose through the trees in the park, but the stars seemed hardly indistinguishable from passing aeroplanes, only they twinkled and moved. You couldn’t see those fields of stars her father wondered at it here on the mountain, those distant constellations, stars beyond number and time, light years away. Beside which the thought of animals talking to each other for a few minutes at Christmas seemed entirely possible.

Takes ages to get there,
Hours in the car
You wonder what all the fuss is
Going so far.
 
But
​just look at the sea
​and then across the sea
to an almost ring of mountains
you will one day be able to name,
one by one,
​they’ll trip off your tongue
​as they do off your mother's
​who’s been coming here
​since I don’t when,
 
and that’s
​maybe why
​it feels so good,
​it's in your blood,
 
the air so clean and fresh,
the sea so cold but clear,
ok, there are midges,
and it might rain a lot,
and you definitely won’t see any otters . . .
 
But this can be a place of miracles!
 
If the wind is right – no midges.
If you sit still long enough – an otter appears.
If you’re really lucky – it won’t rain (too much).
 
I know. I’ve been there too,
And lost my heart to it all.
Just like you.

It is the tipping point
the harvest well begun
its end in sight
an early morning
retreated to past
five on the clock

mist lay on
the meadowed fields
observed the pond
held tight to the trees

walking the empty road
camera in hand
to catch the chill earliness
in the far fields then back
through the uncared-for orchard
past the forked-fingered ash
still quite still -
the night air collapsing
as the sun rose

Darjeeling
in the white bone-china cup
a kiss of milk
comforting this delicate tea

and light everywhere
between three windows
our table her gifts
from the shoreline
shadowed hard-edged
whilst the back-lit screen
blinks and waits for words

my story blended from fact
pestled into fiction
itself a background
to a further fiction
from a past in ancient time
where each image described
takes aim at the resonant heart
of every exquisite moment


Eight Sketches in a Notebook

I

into a western sky
the sun finds cloudspace
to enter and set
well above the sea’s horizon
and for a while its rays
glimmer upward onto shards
holding remnants of the day’s
unreflected light


II

not a hut of straw and rushes
on a far mountain fastness
this a walled stockade all but moated
gardened inside its bounds
a miniature railway said to surround
a six-cornered house facing seaward
and towards a lagoon on whose banks
little terns nest from April to June
a mirror of light upon which
the solitary soul might dwell


III

rock guardian
standing
mid-beach

its debris
spilled
to water’s edge

still as still as
no wind or wave
pools dark depths

further out
the sea shimmers
ablaze with reflections


IV

hiding an anxiety of hair
a headscarf blue
and spotted white
reveals an ear
and below a sturdy neck
on round shoulders
her bare arms fall to quiet hands
next to thighs trousered  
knee-length to gentle calves
falling further onto bare feet
stood standing on course sand
at the sea’s murmuring edge


V

here the rock opens
its lips to a kiss of light
but deep inside remains
a dark sheltering secret
blackness impenetrable
wide enough for a storm’s
intrusion of water and wind
but beyond such darkness
possibly nothing
- a closed door
of rock?


VI

from my canvas chair
on the flags outside
the white French doors
this drawing – from where
the garden gate once was
a gap between
the honey-suckled hedge
and the long low cottage
above an ash tree waving
its fingered branches
in the afternoon breeze
fresh over the hill
from the sea’s shore
hardly a mile away


VII

the land points seaward
to an island light
a mile off-shore

on a shingled beach
sliced by the sea’s knife
cattle wandered yesterday

in the mist-driven rain we
sleeked wet as dogs approached
on the headland’s path


VIII

littered the land lies
with interruptions
interventions of the built

past beside present
ends amongst beginnings

complex histories
to delve deeper into
on this northern shore

A Tale for the Mid-Winter Season after the Mural by Carl Larrson

On the shortest day I wake before our maids from the surrounding farms have converged on Sundborn. Greta lives with us so she will be asleep in that deep slumber only girls of her age seem to own. Her tiny room has barely more than a bed and a chest for her clothes. There is my first painting of her on the wall, little more a sketch, but she was entranced, at seeing herself so. To the household she is a maid who looks after me and my studio,  though she is a literate, intelligent girl, city-bred from Gamla Stan but from a poor home, a widowed mother, her late father a drunkard.  These were my roots, my beginning, exactly. But her eyes already see a world beyond Sundborn. She covets postcards from my distant friends: in Paris, London, Jean in South America, and will arrange them on my writing desk, sometimes take them to her room at night to dream in the candlelight. I think this summer I shall paint her, at my desk, reading my cards, or perhaps writing her own. The window will be open and a morning breeze will make the flowers on the desk tremble.

Karin sleeps too, a desperate sleep born of too much work and thought and interruption. These days before Christmas put a strain on her usually calm disposition. The responsibilities of our home, our life, the constant visitors, they weigh upon her, and dispel her private time. Time in her studio seems impossible. I often catch her poised to disappear from a family coming-together. She is here, and then gone, as if by magic. With the older children home from their distant schools, and Suzanne arrived from England just yesterday morning, they all cannot do without lengthy conferences. They know better than disturb me. Why do you think there is a window set into my studio door? So, if I am at my easel there should be no knock to disturb. There is another reason, but that is between Karin and I.

This was once a summer-only house, but over the years we have made it our whole-year home. There was much attention given to making it snug and warm. My architect replaced all the windows and all the doors and there is this straw insulation between the walls. Now, as I open the curtains around my bed, I can see my breath float out into the cool air. When, later, I descend to my studio, the stove, damped down against the night, when opened and raddled will soon warm the space. I shall draw back the heavy drapes and open the wooden shutters onto the dark land outside. Only then I will stand before my current painting: *Brita and the Sleigh.

Current!? I have been working on this painting intermittently for five years, and Brita is no longer the Brita of this picture, though I remember her then as yesterday. It is a picture of a winter journey for a six-year-old, only that journey is just across the yard to the washhouse. Snow, frost, birds gathered in the leafless trees, a sun dog in the sky, Brita pushing her empty sledge, wearing fur boots, Lisbeth’s old coat, and that black knitted hat made by old Anna. It is the nearest I have come to suggesting the outer landscape of this place. I bring it out every year at this time so I can check the light and the shadows against what I see now, not what I remember seeing then. But there will be a more pressing concern for me today, this shortest day.

Since my first thoughts for the final mural in my cycle for the Nationalmuseum I have always put this day aside, whatever I might be doing, wherever I may be. I pull out my first sketches, that book of imaginary tableaux filled in a day and a night in my tiny garden studio in Grez, thinking of home, of snow, the mid-winter, feeling the extraordinary power and shake of Adam of Bremen’s description of 10th C pre-Christian Uppsala, written to describe how barbaric and immoral were the practices and religion of the pagans, to defend the fragile position of the Christian church in Sweden at the time. But as I gaze at these rough beginnings made during those strange winter days in my rooms at the Hotel Chevilon, I feel myself that twenty-five year old discovering my artistic vision, abandoning oils for the flow and smudge of watercolour, and then, of course, Karin. We were part of the Swedish colony at Grez-sur-Loing. Karin lived with the ladies in Pension Laurent, but was every minute beside me until we found our own place, to be alone and be together, in a cupboard of a house by the river, in Marlotte.

Everyone who painted en-plein-air, writers, composers, they all flocked to Grez just south of Fontainebleau, to visit, sometimes to stay. I recall Strindberg writing to Karin after his first visit: It was as if there were no pronounced shadows, no hard lines, the air with its violet complexion is almost always misty; and I painting constantly, and against the style and medium of the time. How the French scoffed at my watercolours, but my work sold immediately in Stockholm. . . and Karin, tall, slim, Karin, my muse, my lover, my model, her boy-like figure lying naked (but for a hat) in the long grass outside my studio. We learned each other there, the technique of bodies in intimate closeness, the way of no words, the sharing of silent thoughts, together on those soft, damp winter days when our thoughts were of home, of Karin’s childhood home at Sundborn. I had no childhood thoughts I wanted to return to, but Karin, yes. That is why we are here now.

In Grez-sur-Loing, on a sullen December day, mist lying on the river, our garden dead to winter, we received a visitor, a Swedish writer and journalist travelling with a very young Italian, Mariano Fortuny, a painter living in Paris, and his mentor the Spaniard Egusquiza. There was a woman too who Karin took away, a Parisienne seamstress I think, Fortuny’s lover. Bayreuth and Wagner, Wagner, Wagner was all they could talk about. Of course Sweden has its own Nordic Mythology I ventured. But where is it? What is it? they cried, and there was laughter and more mulled wine, and then talk again of Wagner.

When the party left I realized there was something deep in my soul that had been woken by talk of the grandeur and scale of Wagner’s cocktail of German and Scandinavian myths and folk tales. For a day and night I sketched relentlessly, ransacking my memory for those old tales, drawing strong men and stalwart, flaxen-haired women in Nordic dress and ornament. But as a new day presented itself I closed my sketch book and let the matter drop until, years later, in a Stockholm bookshop I chanced upon a volume in Latin by Adam of Bremen, his Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum, the most famous source to pagan ritual practice in Sweden. That cold winter afternoon in Grez returned to me and I felt, as I had then, something stir within me, something missing from my comfortable world of images of home and farm, family and the country life.

Back in Sundborn this little volume printed in the 18th C lay on my desk like a question mark without a sentence. My Latin was only sufficient to get a gist, but the gist was enough. Here was the story of the palace of Uppsala, the great centre of the pre-Christian pagan cults that brought us Odin and Freyr. I sought out our village priest Dag Sandahl, a good Lutheran but who regularly tagged Latin in his sermons. Yes, he knew the book, and from his study bookshelf brought down an even earlier copy than my own. And there and then we sat down together and read. After an hour I was impatient to be back in my studio and draw, draw these extraordinary images this text brought to life unbidden in my imagination. But I did not leave until I had persuaded Pastor Sandahl to agree to translate the Uppsala section of the Adam of Bremen’s book, and just before Christmas that year, on the day before the Shortest Day, he delivered his translation to my studio. He would not stay, but said I should read the passages about King Domalde and his sacrifice at the Winter Solstice. And so, on the day of the Winter Solstice, I did.

This people have a widely renowned sanctuary called Uppsala.

By this temple is a very large tree with extending branches. It is always green, both in winter and in summer. No one knows what kind of tree this is. There is also a spring there, where the heathens usually perform their sacrificial rites. They throw a live human being into the spring. If he does not resurface, the wishes of the people will come true.

The Temple is girdled by a chain of gold that hangs above the roof of the building and shines from afar, so that people may see it from a distance when they approach there. The sanctuary itself is situated on a plain, surrounded by mountains, so that the form a theatre.

It is not far from the town of Sigtuna. This sanctuary is completely covered with golden ornaments. There, people worship the carved idols of three gods: Thor, the most powerful of them, has his throne in the middle of the hall, on either side of him, Odin and Freyr have their seats. They have these functions: “Thor,” they say, “rules the air, he rules thunder and lightning, wind and rain, good weather and harvests. The other, Odin, he who rages, he rules the war and give courage to people in their battle against enemies. The third is Freyr, he offers to mortals lust and peace and happiness.” And his image they make with a very large phallus. Odin they present armed, the way we usually present Mars, while Thor with the scepter seems to resemble Jupiter. As gods they also worship some that have earlier been human. They give them immortality for the sake of their great deeds, as we may read in Vita sancti Ansgarii that they did with King Eirik.

For all these gods have particular persons who are to bring forward the sacrificial gifts of the people. If plague and famine threatens, they offer to the image of Thor, if the matter is about war, they offer to Odin, but if a wedding is to be celebrated, they offer to Freyr. And every ninth year in Uppsala a great religious ceremony is held that is common to people from all parts of Sweden.”
Snorri also relates how human sacrifice began in Uppsala, with the sacrifice of a king.

Domalde took the heritage after his father Visbur, and ruled over the land. As in his time there was great famine and distress, the Swedes made great offerings of sacrifice at Upsal. The first autumn they sacrificed oxen, but the succeeding season was not improved thereby. The following autumn they sacrificed men, but the succeeding year was rather worse. The third autumn, when the offer of sacrifices should begin, a great multitude of Swedes came to Upsal; and now the chiefs held consultations with each other, and all agreed that the times of scarcity were on account of their king Domalde, and they resolved to offer him for good seasons, and to assault and **** him, and sprinkle the stall of the gods with his blood. And they did so.

There it was, at the end of Adam of Bremen’s description of Uppsala, this description of King Domalde upon which my mural would be based. It is not difficult to imagine, or rather the event itself can be richly embroidered, as I have over the years made my painting so. Karin and I have the books of William Morris on our shelves and I see little difference between his fixation on the legends of the Arthur and the Grail. We are on the cusp here between the pagan and the Christian.  What was Christ’s Crucifixion but a self sacrifice: as God in man he could have saved himself but chose to die for Redemption’s sake. His blood was not scattered to the fields as was Domalde’s, but his body and blood remains a continuing symbol in our right of Communion.

I unroll the latest watercolour cartoon of my mural. It is almost the length of this studio. Later I will ask Greta to collect the other easels we have in the house and barn and then I shall view it properly. But for now, as it unrolls, my drama of the Winter Solstice comes alive. It begins on from the right with body of warriors, bronze shields and helmets, long shafted spears, all set against the side of Uppsala Temple and more distant frost-hoared trees. Then we see the King himself, standing on a sled hauled by temple slaves. He is naked as he removes the furs in which he has travelled, a circuit of the temple to display himself to his starving people. In the centre, back to the viewer, a priest-like figure in a red cloak, a dagger held for us to see behind his back. Facing him, in druidic white, a high priest holds above his head a gold pagan monstrance. To his left there are white cloaked players of long, straight horns, blue cloaked players of the curled horns, and guiding the shaft of the sled a grizzled shaman dressed in the skins and furs of animals. The final quarter of my one- day-to-be-a-mural unfolds to show the women of temple and palace writhing in gestures of grief and hysteria whilst their queen kneels prostate on the ground, her head to the earth, her ladies ***** behind her. Above them all stands the forever-green tree whose origin no one knows.

Greta has entered the studio in her practiced, silent way carrying coffee and rolls from the kitchen. She has seen Midvinterblot many times, but I sense her gaze of fascination, yet again, at the figure of the naked king. She remembers the model, the sailor who came to stay at Kartbacken three summers ago. He was like the harpooner Queequeg in Moby ****. A tattooed man who was to be seen swimming in Toftan Lake and walking bare-chested in our woods. A tall, well-muscled, almost silent man, whom I patiently courted to be my model for King Dolmade. I have a book of sketches of him striding purposefully through the trees, the tattooed lines on his shoulders and chest like deep cuts into his body. This striding figure I hid from the children for some time, but from Greta that was impossible. She whispered to me once that when she could not have my substantial chest against her she would imagine the sailor’s, imagine touching and following his tattooed lines. This way, she said, helped her have respite from those stirrings she would so often feel for me. My painting, she knew, had stirred her fellow maids Clara and Solveig. Surely you know this, she had said, in her resolute and direct city manner. I have to remember she is the age of my eldest, who too must hold such thoughts and feelings. Karin dislikes my sailor king and wishes I would not hide the face of his distraught queen.

Today the sunrise is at 9.0, just a half hour away, and it will set before 3.0pm. So, after this coffee I will put on my boots and fur coat, be well scarfed and hatted (as my son Pontus would say) and walk out onto my estate. I will walk east across the fields towards Spardasvvägen. The sky is already waiting for the sun, but waits without colour, hardly even a tinge of red one might expect.

I have given Greta her orders to collect every easel she can find so we can take Midvinterblot off the floor and see it in all its vivid colour and form. In February I shall begin again to persuade the Nationalmuseum to accept this work. We have a moratorium just now. I will not accept their reasoning that there is no historical premise for such a subject, that such a scene has no place in a public gallery. A suggestion has been made that the Historiska museet might house it. But I shall not think of this today.

Karin is here, her face at the studio window beckons entry. My Darling, yes, it is midwinter’s day and I am dressing to greet the solstice. I will dress, she says, to see Edgar who will be here in half an hour to discuss my designs for this new furniture. We will be lunching at noon. Know you are welcome. Suzanne is talking constantly of England, England, and of course Oxford, this place of dreaming spires and good looking boys. We touch hands and kiss. I sense the perfume of sleep, of her bed.

Outside I must walk quickly to be quite alone, quite apart from the house, in the fields, alone. It is on its way: this light that will bathe the snowed-over land and will be my promise of the year’s turn towards new life.

As I walk the drama of Midvinterblot unfolds in a confusion of noise, the weeping of women, the physical exertions of the temple slaves, the priests’ incantations, the riot of horns, and then suddenly, as I stand in this frozen field, there is silence. The sun rises. It stagge

After the well-know,
charismatic,
extremely photogenic,
wonderfully articulate,
jeweller-turned-gardener,
your mother dotes on,
this cat is named.
 
He is none of the above
I should say
but I like him.
He reminds me of my late cat
Poppy, a more gauche pusscat
you’d be hard to find.
 
Poppy was a farm cat
of uncertain progeny.
Monty is certainly better bred
but (as we say in West Yorkshire)
‘daft as a brush’.
 
And now for the T.S.Eliot bit . . .
(in the style of
​Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats)
 
Curled up upon the green chair
With his head against his paws
You can see his body breathing
Up and down
 
He’s been busy all day long
Doing absolutely nothing
Save a bit of this a bit of that
And washing clean his paws.
 
Life’s so hard
For such a busy cat,
When you’re asleep in bed
He’s about and out
 
Networking the side streets
Monty likes to know the scene.
These cats could teach us all
A thing or two.
 
In the morning he may be dozy
But you should see him after dark
Sharp and bright and really
On his toes.

Riding the hills
Wonder of reflected light
Shine on those
Dear near and far
Fast under the same spell
Momentarily struck
Out of the present
Into past’s stillness
 
Once on a summer’s night
Clouds – like
Grey cut-outs
Held in the trembling hand
Of a paper puppeteer -
Moved left to right
Across a proscenium of sky
The stage winged by trees
An old mill a backcloth
Of chimneys and angled roofs
The narrow bridge
Its river breathing
In a pit of darkness
 
The set on which our actors stand
 
In the space between heartbeats
The spirits of Basil and Peggy
Catch the silver orb
As it flies behind the clouds
And just like that falling star
Place it deep
In a pocket
Never to let it go
Never

Sometimes I think
I must be done with singing,
singing you this rich song,
this song of what
the poets call love unbound
(unhinged more like
as it brings me apart
at the seams) and there,
in an undressed state, it
blows through me and I know
I am neither myself nor
what I might recognize
as myself : instead this solitary man
waiting on her next word,
her favoured look, a light
touch to the shoulder,
which says there is this
flowing between us, a passion
for that detail, those small things
able to make big things possible,
obtainable.

And so this singing can never be done
because it can only be like this now,
never done with, always more waiting
as for a future wind, no matter how well
it might be forecast, we’ll rediscover it
afresh and laugh and smile bigger
smiles than we did at its first breath.

This is what love does to friendship
and the knowledge of the other,
always more to learn,
always more to see and know,
a cascade, yes a cascading
from one to the other
as sand in the hand
to a lower hand
and then reversed.
And so what we see
as morning greets us
severally, but so often apart
and from different windows,
is a coming together
in a joined thought – our morning
is this, or this, or this even.
and so we hold morningness
out to each other like the gift it is,
until later when, reassured that
we are really, really
in each other’s arms,
we feel the truth of it
deep in ourselves.

It’s the fallen strap of her blue shift
fallen from her shoulder.
There, just a glimpse of a gold ring on her left hand
as the hand gathers, between forefinger and thumb,
the drop to her waist of lustrous hair,  chestnut brown, still.
So with the left arm and shoulder unclothed, the fold
in her forearm hides her breast's slight swell.

She has long eyebrows, a broad forehead.
See, the hint of a hairbrush in her right hand.
The nose is thin and perhaps a little long
for beauty. Lips set, almost pursed,
she is looking into nowhere:
a dream, some enchantment?
No, she sees the harbour this morning
before the sun rose when, sleepless,
she walked out, not far, but barefoot.
Hardly a slip of wind to stir
the hem of her slight dress,
only the sound of sea’s breathing,

Later in her studio
(before Leonard wakes)
Nancy sits in front of her latest canvas.
Having bunched up her dress
well above her sun-stained knees,
she grasps a palette knife:
to scour here, scrape, scrape into paint there.
Pausing, momentarily
she looks into and beyond the image . . .

Today, later, she will stand in that pose
she knows he loves, where she (before bed),
brushing her long lustrous chestnut hair,
lets the blue strap of that calico shift
fall - and rest – held loosely against
golden flesh of her upper arm.

So the year ends
With a blaze
Of sun’s gold
And amber fire
Lit in the western sky
To guide
December home
Throughout a dark night
Towards the dawn’s light,
A fresh day,
A new year.

So the clock strikes
With a chime
Of twelve strokes
And then the year
Has passed away for good
And said
Goodbye, farewell
Throughout a dark night
Towards the dawn’s light,
A fresh day,
A new year.

Day opening, the blind’s tug and lift,
there on the counterpane, cards,
a nest of gifts tied with golden thread
serrated to the touch, bowed too
with deft hands, a box when un-papered
reveals a (stone-like shell-like) form
picked from a south-facing beach
and woven round to make
(harp-like warp-like) a loom
to weave the waves play.


Holding in her small hands,
the still-to-be-given gift
(beyond all gifts this bright day)
the stroke, the brush
of fingertips on the harvest field
of a bare arm, she unbows,
pulling preciousness so close
that between themselves
a shared to and fro comes
to the very moment of joy.


To walk out
on the springiest day
closing the door
on house and home,
taking off to a near-
distant hill now glowing
in greens and holding above
itself a tableau of blue and white
and grey clouds bringing
cool wind to bare knees.


Never an intrusion
on nature’s ambience
(our footfall on the path,
the wind breezing
through sun-dapple trees)
your voice’s song
sings out in the crisp air.
Quite under your spell words
turn and fall like the flowers
from a blossomed pear.


Once over the river
and up the glen,
following a stream,
passing self-sheared sheep,
a gradual climb with a
view forming behind us.
Horses relaxed in fields
then galloping furiously.
Cries of curlews now,
chuckles of grouse.


Lapwing
Flop and flap wing
Tumble over bird
In the moorland
Sky turning the
Cold May wind
Over and over
No steady state
In this brisk air
Lapwing.


On to the moor
and we stop,
backs to a rock
for a baked brownie treat -
coffee and cake and a vista of valleys.
Alone in the sunshine
we celebrate her success
(with smiles and a kiss)
of this chocolate confection
(a high 9.6 on the outdoor scale).


This empty place
so full of sky,
so rich in views
across and over and
down to folding valleys,
then up to far far-distant hills.
Stopped by a circle  
of twelve standing stones,
cold fingers reach
for a warm hand.


A stanza-ed stone
straddling a stream,
a paragraphed poem
breaking the unbroken thread
where water unbinds
and hangs at the waterfall face.
Pleased to be found
(and after a trek)
this stanza-ed stone
at Backstone Beck.

Smooth, smooth, fringed by yellow smudged, hard plastic
smooth, left to right then a painterly inconclusive running
out, the stroke all 60” expires into the yellow, then a firm
vertical orange stripe, a bookend, a hot surface elevated
upon a warm yellow bed, exotic, turmeric, heated from
below, as though from another world, a future planet found
in Manga, gum wrappers, belonging to the wedding
wardrobes of older women, and those with impossible
shoes, maybe a scarf, definitely lipstick and small Japanese
cars, decorative paper, a can’t-miss logo, as when I close
my eyes in the act of love, holding your kneeling body to
me I lose myself in a pattern of flashes, the bright play of
light and colour, a sensual play of pigment, blue and red
wavelengths, fuchsine, electric, electric, and the aura of
artists, such latent energy, hidden passion, rich in ******
fragrance, edged with desire.

The path of the brush now right to left yellow exposes a
yellow bookend at the left hand edge, there is a roughness
here in its covering of yellow, as though applied in haste or
in a single gesture with a large brush, it is thick, thick and
rough, but the yellow is almost present, a hint, a reflection,
as in the petals of the Bellis Perennis, you open your mouth
breathing, breathing your lips frame such perfect teeth as
day arrives,

Left to right, the paint thick then thinning to a broken
tailpiece revealing yellow on magenta, again, again, again, again,
how little I yet understand your body, the innerness,
the sheltered regions of your desire, I am afraid to harm this
preciousness, be disrespectful of the tapering valley where
love’s caress and kiss meet, are multi-dimensional, the
rectangle is not charcoal, but deflected, hesitant, to the left
the darkness of chocolate, to the right a greyness, a *****
grey, a dusty dark dog, loamed, a depth then play of
shadow, dark, textural as your maidenhair under the covers
above my right hand as it spreads my fingers across its
darkness into deeper darkness, a flat stone, its left end
washed by the cold tide, olived, clothed in mourning, there
is unpleasantness, some distaste, a little fear, the unknown,
the unknowable.

Daisy petals, opening in the morning light, the clapperboard
house on the Block Island beachside fresh-painted every
spring, immediately weathered, porcelained sea shell
textured, turned, tumbled, a dawn sky after rain,
ceramicised fungi, plain flour, acidic, taut, the moment
when the heart and breath seem to pause as we join each
other’s flesh as though this cannot be cannot really be.

Unrhymable this flower shade hued pigment deep saffron
vibrant, phoned, not quite of the fruit, a different tang,
sharper without sheen, magenta beneath its smoothed
surface up to left and right edge, (but for the yellow
frill beneath), lip covering, silk-scarfed, not autumnal yet, but oh
those Californian poppies, those desert landscapes as the
sun sets,

a single uneven gesture thrown left to right, an island
in silhouette with a rocky foreshore spreads into distance,

a bed of sylvan jade, an oasis, this an aerial view of tree
tops modulating to grassy pasture, a down-stroke western
boundary, an edge of surf on its northern border, perhaps
the brush formerly coloured has left its trace,

the main body of this Australian desert seen from the air,
Sidney Nolan’s bush, aboriginal earth, coloured mud,
unguent, the sense of liquid in your kiss, its warmth, the
very tip and corner of your lips, the brush of hair as you
move your head to my chest, the rubbing of hair on hair,
under your arms this play of sensation through the lips’
touch, then the shore, the sand no sand though, only in the
brochures, daffodilled perhaps, unsmudged, fresh,
vigorously golden, well-watered.

In pigeon light
this damp day
settles itself
into lamp-room grey.
 
The trees intone
farewell farewell:
An autumnal valedictory
to reluctant leaves.
 
Yet a few remain
bold coloured
 
Porphry Pink
Fox Red
Fowler
Sudbury Yellow
 
hanging by a thread
they turn in the stillest air.
 
Then fall
Then fall

Its perspective skewed,
the lie of this land
is all tilts and angles.
Black-thorned hedges
rise in white clouds
to the hilltop farm.
On this Damson Day
it is a damp-mist morning,
the horizon a grey smudge.

Up forest trail and fell-ward,
on the left, a winter-laid hedge,
to the right, a mossy wall.
A riot of new growth lies
at the feet, by the hand:
wild garlic, wilder strawberry,
fresh ferns, and the tiniest violets
hiding on this old path.
Steep steps climb
to a four-acre orchard
primrosed under the pint-sized
trunks of its wiry trees.

There’s the blossom, white as snow.

Hard to imagine
five months hence,
fully plummed and picked,
Bullace and Damascene
driven by the cartload
to Kendal market.
250 tons they’d reckoned
once, taken by train
to the Preston canners.
Nearer home the fruit
was gined and beered,
cheesed and chucknied.

Then into the forest,
a plantation girdled
by a dry stone wall
tall on the moorland edge
where beyond
the grey limestone shards
have broken through what
little grass is left  
for absent cattle.

Wild with wind
up here today,
so down to reclaim
the forest’s shelter,
and down through fields
to a farm en fête
all cars and crowds.

This, a damson day of best-judged jam,
with artisan breads, Morris with swords,
fiddling folk, agility dogs, St Kilda sheep,
blue eggs and tents of crafts galore.

In the mist and drizzle
homeward and facing west,
there across the valley lie
outposts of blossoming,
fields embroidered,
and the farms necklaced.

I

Curled
a snake of a road
uplifted on a bank
of mud falling
to a welter of mud
glistening gleaming
in the afternoon light

Underfoot
on the rough road
a green mossy
water-**** alive
out in the air
waits to be swept
over and again
by the evening tide


II

Let me stand still
from this relentless
passaging looking
attentive always
investigating the possibilities
of all the eye can see
within a footstep’s distance
an arm’s reach
a hand’s touch

Let me stand still
on this low **** wall
between estuary water
and a channel in the marsh
One - a lively blue
waved and winded
every which way
The other - a muddy brown
rippling in one direction
in slow procession

Let me stand still
but turn slowly
to mark the edges
of the sky’s horizon
turning clockwise
from the north
and return -
a whole sky seen

Let me stand in wonder
as flock and skein
a sky-squadron of geese
high-flying over head
southward out of a pool
of midday estuary light
to disappear beyond
the mainland shore


III

The boat keels over
so the line of her
below-water body
reveals a womanly self
that roundness
that beamyness
so rightly feminine
and now holding to herself
a heeling hull
full-breasted sails
taut in wind and water

IV

A drawing makes the ordinary important
It is a text that forgetting words for once
spells out the body's role in fashioning
our creative thought

Its contours no longer
mark the edge
of what you’ve seen
but what you might become
- each mark a stepping stone
to cross a subject as if a river
and put it then - behind you

V

Soon to be sloed
but wait a while . . .
its lovely flowers
must form first
on this shrub we call
Prunus Spinosa
the Blackthorn

Flowering against
the sky’s blue morning
as if it were -
a cloud of whiteness
a masking of lacework
spread on stiff branches

Yet here
in the garden below
this towered room
in which I write
the shrub has clothed
the end of the garden’s
marsh-facing wall
above and across
and on either side
spreading to newly-cut grass
falling on the pasture beyond
holding itself
purposefully against
the prevailing wind

VI

Silvery in gun-metal greyness
this evergreen edible shrub
(the Sea Purslane)
with mealy leaves
and star-shaped flowers
form a natural border
twixt shoreline path
and salt-sea strand

A hiding place
for ***** its leaves
hold fronds that take
a reddish hue
a delicate shade
welcome-colouring
in this marshness of mud
and brown water

VII

How fitting are the words
correctly scribed on the bench
by the wall in the orchard
next the pond on this fine
sunny day Certainly
‘The time has come, ‘
the Walrus said,
‘To speak of many things:
of shoes and ships
and sealing wax - of cabbages
and kings’.

Yes - this gentle morning
blessed by softest breeze
and shadow-playing light
has formed a place of peace
to summon thoughts
that hold no sense
except to scan so rightly
for the writer’s pen
the reader’s voice

Such random objects
fuel imagination’s play
this sunny day upon
the bench beside the wall
within the orchard
next the pond

VIII

By dancing shadows on the wall
a plaque records his gift:
orchard - pond - and all within
two garden walls
a rough masonry
variously gathered
rich in colour
mark and fissure

Four Italianate hives
cylindrically domed
precariously tiled
set at ends and in between
on fifty yards of facing walls
- as cotes for doves perhaps?
to coo and coo . .
when shadows
move and flicker
on the wall
to and fro to and fro

because he loved this island
so - he wished his memories
might live here and now

IX

Together on the sea wall
she said look
an owl on that fence
over there
Short-eared she said

and so silent
(with surreptitious step)
we advanced - it stirred
and lifting its broad-winged
body flowed into flight
with slow strong strokes
beating hard towards the sea

but changing its mind
(and poising on the wind)
returned to quarter
the field below
where we stood standing
rapt by its silent purpose
as it turned and tumbled
to get a better view
of whatever poor creature
lay beneath its
telescopic sight

X

Here to seek a stillness
I don’t own but claim
I do  - so here and now
in this quiet corner
(my back to that rough-hewn wall
fluid with its dance of shadows)
I wait to hear to listen
and to know . . .

Seated on this bench inscribed
with Lewis Carol’s words
there is an invitation made
to take the time
to talk of many things
(if only to oneself)
Insignificant actions
Graceful words of love
Admiration and respect
for friends and simple pleasures -
We are so blest in all such things . . .
*believing always
a greater Providence
that (so to speak)
waits ahead of us

To hear you had not slept;
to imagine you awake at three am.
followed me around all day.
To feel I could have been the cause;
to think my absence from your bed
might hold you sleepless through the night,

‘till dawn that is,
when the first birds
in the still-dark make
tentative noises-off,

a pre-dawn refrain
before some semblance of day
brings forth the ripieno choir.
Only then you slept.

This companionship we keep
relies on sleep-filled nights
and settled days, stress-free meals,
gentle evenings with our books,
and the occasional walking out
under the Spring moon.

It is so measured that rising arpeggio, only to fall and rise again in quicker values, through the dominant seventh to the heartache moment of that minor ninth, a very apogee of dissonance. Then it goes higher still to the fifth, holding to that Phrygian harmony before returning to the tonic minor and a measured fall in the bass. This is a deliberate descent to the sub-mediant, and Bach’s touch of magic, the equivalence with the dominant minor ninth. But then he gives us hope: an extended and joyful play through sequences that rise and fall within each bar, to rest finally on the mediant’s echo of that opening, that measured rise and the quickening fall. We have hardly smiled with relief when Bach pulls us back into the insecurity of the dominant of the subdominant, that V of IV acting like a bridge to a long, long discourse in the dominant, a pedal E holding firmly to itself whilst rising arpeggios and falling decorations and sequences pull and pull through innocently related keys. Longer and longer play the rising passages until short motives of imitation interrupt, treble to bass, tenor to alto, until:  a first inversion arpeggio of the dominant seventh measures out the opening rhythm. This happens twice in short succession, as though holding the progress of the music to account. A questioning perhaps before a four-fold sequence asserts the dominant and a chorded caesura. There is a pregnant, though faintly resonant silence as Bach spins the dice of tonality and chooses the subdominant to bring the music towards a waiting Allemande. The music moves through a play of subdominant to dominant, minor to major, the mix of flattened fifth and flattened ninth. It is those intervals that determine Bach as the father of ambiguity in the 20C school of jazz harmony, Arpeggio then a falling scale, and repeat and repeat again, but moving ever higher by sequence. At last five chords – merely a shorthand for closure via the expectation of a right display of the performer’s improvisatory prowess. They prepare us reverently for the tonic minor before the stately Allemande leads the music into the elegant steps of its walking dance.

I was ill,
convalescing in fact
when I read this book
On Poetry.
 
I was a captive audience,
couldn’t move much.
I sat by a window
and enjoyed the light
playing shadows.
 
Twice in two days
I read this book.
It convinced me I was already
a judge of poets and like its author
only needed seconds to know
whether a poet was present in a poem.
 
The book encouraged me to
‘Read all the way back.
Read what made it.
Read what’s still here
And work out why . . .
Read up on the old stories
Know a little of what past poets knew
And what their poems still know.’
 
I thought that was quite enough.
But no, a little later
there was more I had to learn.
 
I was given as a gift
a collection of poems.
Its prizewinning author
had published respectably.
Imagination would take flight
into airspace off the radar screen.
Childhood scenes were to chill and disturb,
erotica left a bad taste in the mouth,
narrative poems told with a twist, and
common-place objects freshly observed.
Dear Reader, this I can truly say
is a confident, page-turning volume,
full of proper poems,
full of a poet’s presence.
 
But, for me
there was a significant absence of wonder,
a sad deficiency of joy.
 
When I brought the book to bed
to read out loud to the one I love,
not one of the poems seemed
right to read to end our day.
These poems called for hard chairs
and the bright lights of a seminar room.
 
Later, awake in the night,
I thought,
I’m not hard-edged enough to be a real poet.
My poet’s view is too parochial and kind.
I write about penguins, the moon,
even Christmas cake . . . and prose poems
on subjects filched from postcards
picked up in museums and galleries.
 
And there is, inevitably and always,
this ever-present thing called love,
creeping about when you least expect it.
Know I’m at one with Dr Givens
in Guteson’s East of the Mountains
who laments that with death
the tender memories of life
will be gone –
forever.
 
So with my poems I try to record
the daily wonder of life and love:
for those I care for
and those who care for me.
 
Life is so inexpressively full
of images and moments
waiting for words to bring them home.
 
Oh I know there’s pain,
and fear and distress,
hate and abuse and terror . . .
This is not for me what poetry
is there to express.
I’ve read enough to know it can,
and does. That’s enough.
*Poetry forms in the face of time.
You master form you master time.

This is a poem
made by her hand
a poem of marks
you can read
left to right

right to left
any which way
an ascemic script
it tells a tale
late in the day

beside a river still
sunlit clouds vast
in a Maytime sky
down on the mud
and shingled shore

these found things
arrived at her feet
as they do when
waiting for her
dear hand’s touch

upon their metalled
forms rusted and
rivered by the daily
tides the diurnal
wash and dry of

weather and watered
river mud-coloured
beside boats bedded
in the river bank each
plaqued to remember

thirty wooden boats in all
that plied a river’s journey
there and back once
to and fro now
charged up high

on Pulton shore
a motorized trow
a top-sail schooner
Edith and the
New Despatch

steel and concrete
barges Severn Collier
and Mighty Monarch
lying hard into the silt
a yard at rest

a grave of vessels

When all is said and done
with the day we lie
as one form splayed on our bed:
poetry’s slaves here shackled
fast to the word.
Now beaten, now caressed,
perplexed and often
moved by rhythm’s rhyme
to tears and more -
if there’s a sweeter gift this side
of love’s kiss it waits upon another page,
which we may turn one night,
and finding fall into pleasure’s pain.

The hill
beckons
willing feet,
take firm steps
on steep slopes.
Rising quickly,
a first view.

Thereafter,
and steeper still,
rocks replace grass,
boots slide on lichened stone.

As mist falls
a sudden chill.
Silence.

Sightless of distance
each 'summit' brings
yet one more.