he will send her out changed and astonished

into the radiant world.

Mrs Meakin Opens Her Window to the Larks

It takes her back to a morning years before,

shaking out the dust from an upstairs window

after hours of indoor toiling –

the same sense of leaning into a blue

which seemed, like the spiralling arias,

to carry on forever

and her own wide-armed gesture like a farewell

as if, on the spur of that moment,

she’d let herself go.

Early One Morning

(for Douglas’s Grandmother)

As he spoke you rose up

in your light cotton dress,

came walking towards us

out of a valley of brood mares and fevers,

carrying your case

with its one change of clothes,

the price of a week’s lodgings

tucked in your purse

and beyond that a future

you’d never have dreamed:

its hills still misty

at this hour of the day

and somewhere, two wars

and four daughters away,

here I am listening

as you turn into song.

To Manor Farm Only

Halfway between two sleepy villages

a fingerpost points across a meadow

empty of the cattle that lowed for a week

until they forgot grass.

Now their milky faces loom dreamily

through the bars of their hay racks.

Frost in the hollows,

the path curving down towards a small river

where, hidden from view among willows,

there must be a footbridge just wide enough

and after that, another mile or two perhaps

through fields flooding blue at this hour,

the stars moving in their slow herds

as you leave the last gate open.

Verses

And there followed him a certain

young man, having a linen cloth cast

about his naked body; and the young

men laid hold on him:

And he left the linen cloth, and

fled from them naked.

ST MARK’S GOSPEL, CH. 14, V. 51-52

Who are you, young man

without a name

whose tender curiosity leads you,

pale and shivering, every spring

to the edge of passion?

No one knows, not even the writer

who couldn’t quite bring himself to edit you out

though you play no further part in the story,

your life before and after

blank as the sheet you leave behind.

And yet a ditch of cow parsley,

a patch of moonlight or bed linen

glimmering on a washing line

and here you are again, haring off

across the garden, naked and older.

*

My grandmother once told me how,

in a more innocent time,

the farmer would drive up to the hill top field

and shine his headlamps full

into the ripening wheat

until, through the warm summer night,

the courting couples began to appear,

rising up hand in hand

and walking towards the brightness shyly

as if out of a parable or dream.

The Gardener

This time of year again –

doing the work we must bend to or kneel,

like the man rising at evening

from the furrows he’s been digging all day,

his hands muddy with planting,