on reduced means, a cricketer’s widow

sowing a kitchen garden with sweet peas.

A lighthouse-keeper counting aeroplanes.

Old blackout curtains staunch the break of day.

Regard the way they dwell, the harking back:

how the women at home went soldiering on

with pillows for husbands, fingers for sons,

how man after man emerged at dawn

from his house, in his socks, then laced his boots

on the step, locked up, then steadied himself

to post a key back through the letterbox.

The afternoon naps, the quaint hours they keep.

But since you ask them, that is how they sleep.

WORKING FROM HOME

When the tree-cutter came with his pint-size mate,

I sat in the house but couldn’t think.

For an hour he lurked in the undergrowth,

trimming the lower limbs, exposing the trunks.

I moved upstairs but there he was, countersunk eyes

and as bald as a spoon, emergent in orange rays,

head popping out through leafage or fir,

a fairy light in the tree of heaven,

a marker-buoy in the new plantation of silver pine.

Or traversing, bough to bough, from one dead elm

to the next, or holding on by his legs only,

or acrobranching the canopy. At lunch,

he pulled the wooden ladder up behind,

perched in the crown of a laurel, and smoked.

He nursed the petrol-driven chainsaw like a false arm.

The dwarf swept berries and beech-nuts into a cloth bag.

I was dodging between rooms now, hiding from view.

Down below they cranked up the chipping machine,

fed timber and brushwood into the hopper.

Through a gap in the curtains I looked, saw into its maw—

steel teeth crunching fishbone twigs,

chomping thick wood, gagging on lumber and stumps.

Sawdust rained into the caged truck.

Birds were flying into the arms of a scarecrow

on Pole Moor, or leaving for Spain. I sat on the steps

between ground-floor and upstairs, thought of his face

at the bathroom window watching me shave,

his lips in the letterbox, wanting to speak.

THE BACK MAN

Five strong, we were, not including the guide,

five of us walking a well-trodden path

through the reserve, from the camp to the stream

and the flooded forest on the far side.

Dragonflies motored past like fish on the wing.

Beetles lifted their solar-panelled shells.

A bird, invisible, ran through its scale

like a thumbnail strummed on a metal comb.

The branches of trees were shelves in a shop

selling insect brooches and snakeskin belts

and miniature frogs with enamelled heads.

The monkeys fancied themselves as soft toys.

Blue orchids offered themselves without shame.

Late afternoon, and the heat in the shade

was stale and gross, a queasy, airless warmth,

centuries old. I was the last in line,

the back man, when from out of nowhere

it broke, I mean flew at me from behind

and I saw in my mind’s eye the carved mask

of its face, the famous robe of black fur,

the pins and amulets of claws and feet,