the rain sifts through my attempts
to grasp it with mere hands:
one cannot understand
without going through its constant
shift and change of faces.
As to another, one learns
to ask the right questions,
naturally, at the opportune time.
Like in all things
Every conversation
Which pass through us
Were never truly there.
Those that do stay are bereft
of meaning.

What remains often
is the damp, moistness
of the late -ber month showers:
regret, loss, a tactless remark.
They share the same fate in all
of this, the slow, uptake for words:
closure, a second chance, a bad joke
like the heavy traffic we always have
to endure - a cartload heavy
-laden with stockpiled souvenirs
with no particular use except
for reminiscing, a flickering hope
for the last bus ride home.

One day, you will
miss all of this.
And the only thing
that is left to endure,
is memory.

14 October 2017

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.

O, to be in dear Petronella
Now that Spring is here!
But alas, poor lass, she is no more,
Bereft of life, dead and gone,
Breathing through the grass,
O woe, O woe are we,
The fat ****'s snuffed it.

No more will I and my friends
Ardent admirers all
(by the rancid cartload),
Feel her horrid toothless gums
Slurp their lascivious path of glory
Across our bloated obesities,
******* and slobbering,
Muttering sweetest nothings
Through mangled, matted pubics.

No more shall we feel her body
Groaning under every butch ******,
Uttering imprecations of desire.
However one consolation is ours:
We who remain behind on earth
Can have undisputed use of the giant *******
And will no longer need to cleanse it
Following Petronella's awful misuse thereof.

These horrid thoughts came to me
As in a terrible, foetid nightmare;
And I dreamed I saw Petronella's grave
Bedecked with flowers and phlegm;
And the holy angels sang overhead,
"It's an ill wind that blows
Out of the back passage
Once it's been ****** good and hard".

She was
not old enough
to have graduated
high school,
nor aware enough to
notice
how many eyes were on her,
sympathetic or
disdainful or
hungry,
as she struggled to push a cart full of
pull-ups
and cleaning supplies
in a cart with a broken wheel

through the warm and somniferous glow
of ill-maintained streetlights,

those obelisks of granite.

Don't call it
pity,

but
something
stirred my gut,
and burned my eyes,

as she trudged past me,
pushing a cartload of motherhood,
trailing a warm autumn breeze,
an aromatic telegram;

lilac and lavender,
a diffident bouquet,
accented by spritely vanilla,

withering before bleach-fumes
and mordant disinfectant.

it felt like a break-up
we weren't lovers

you could have left me
sublime with hope
days
months
years
in that
gentle silence

i would have spent
the rest of my life
your wife

possibility
happily wed

even the doctor says
one good hope
is worth a cartload of certainties