October Sunlight

     for Zoe Avastu
 
I’ve got a new eye in, but October sunlight’s
kind to it. I think the zigzags on the red brick wall
– a random kind of jigsaw – are a distortion
from the stitching that the surgeon wove,
He might have sat cross-legged like a tailor,
above the opaque screen across my brow
as he traded embroidery-stitch anecdotes
with his apprentice who is over here from Cairo.
 
But October sunlight’s frank too,
and shows things as I think they are.
Mortar-sliced bricks on the angled coping
duel with railing shadows projected from the south.
Slim red-fingered leaves on the tree by the bird-table
propose a less perplexing theorem.
As I stroll home, contemplating ziggurats, interstices
and the interval between equinox and solstice,
a white cat rises from the shadow of a shed
as eye-soothing pale as last night’s moon.
 

David Ashbee

in collection Poems from the Mind Shop, 2020, Dempsey & Windle,
ISBN 978-1-913329-30-3