Thundering lorries with somewhere

to get to by dawn.

Beads of dew forming

along the telegraph wires.

A red deer delicately eating

each closed tulip like a prayer.

Summer Storm

We wake to carpets darkened and drenched,

curtains wringing like the skirts of a heroine.

The lives we assumed would be continued

lie strewn across the garden

still shocked

by the great, blank sheets of light:

sodden tartan rugs, the scattered cushions of absent children,

bowls swimming with dashed blossom,

wine glasses filled to the brim,

a novel lying face down, swollen with rain.

I stand barefoot on the soaking grass

like the woman who walked away without a scratch.

In the sun the shirts and summer dresses hang glittering

like the clothes of the baptised.

Moonflower

Today she wakes heavy as a stone

without knowing why

her skin chilled

as the milk on her doorstep.

She moves through the morning’s

dark circles

like the old – slowly –

with a sense of something forgotten.

By noon, broody for sleep, she succumbs

climbing back into bed

sheets wide as a field.

The pollen freckling her arms

the grass-seed threading the hem

of her nightdress

are easily missed.

She sinks deep without dreaming

(only last night

a moth mistook her throat

for a flower)

Hide Nor Hair

By lunchtime the fields and private woods should be echoing,

the doors of barns and outbuildings dragged open,

their rusted machinery exposed to the sun.

By dusk it should be serious as the river.

It takes until nightfall to become a dream –

the creak of dark stairs, the back door sticking

for the last time, that ring of mushrooms on the green

blooming in the moonlight like a soul.

Harvest

For once when you ask

I follow without question,

brushing past the sour nettles

that choke the gap in the hawthorn hedge

to stand at the edge of this moment

you have led us to:

full and clear

it rises like music over the wheat.

Far off a back-yard dog

starts barking at the stars

and is answered in kind –

We are this far apart but not alone.

Across the bone dry fields

a farmhouse window is shining like home

as a light will always shine

when seen from a great enough distance.

Garbo Among Us

She could be this woman you hold a glass door

open for, not because she’s beautiful but old;

or perhaps you brushed shoulders with her fur

as you hurried along the crowded winter street;

or that pale-faced girl you stopped to ask for directions,

didn’t she speak as if her words were a commandment

to leave this world entirely –

carry on to the end, then keep on walking?

Wherever you go it may be that you’re touched

without knowing it, strangely and lightly

as a flurry of snow in the night

touches the stone kings and rough sleepers.

The Promise of Snow

Why risk setting out at this late hour,