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Anna has never kept ducks, has friends who own only a king-size bed and a black 'Glide she covets to ride solo across the Painted Desert.
Afraid of heights she's walked Striding Edge climbed a jack-in-the-beanstalk ladder vertical up a face in the Puye Cliffs
and relaxing in bergamot fragrant suds she ponders a home far from the city and bookshops, the music, cafes, friends she meets week-ends in galleries with glass roofs and staircases where she rarely thinks of the cave by the river ghosting her mind like the eyes of that seal in Wales, the smells of a bluebell wood in spring.
She'll make extensions of wood and glass and mud to her forever-home
will read and paint, write strange, startling phrases. On drizzly nights she'll gaze at moons and galaxies through glass, on soft dry evenings stretch beside the waterfall, whispering with owls and birch trees, chuckling as otters slide mud-glossy slopes and foxes leap and yelp, unable to reach the tree-house she built for her ducks.
The sea and promenade plucked from a Dufy canvas light and azure as a cherub in flight but overhead, gulls try to convince us they're vultures and at the next table a dog displays an alarming tic.
Baker's Lane and Bread Street substantial enough but we don't expect a greeting from the man pushing a wheelbarrow of grain up to the old brewery.
You showed me painted angels with wings like falcons poised above the cathedral nave. No surprise to see one here, swinging his legs from a sturdy oak rafter in the tythe barn.
Giant yew teacups hover, skimming the lawn's surface. They're evenly spaced and ready for the tea-party. It will probably be dark by then.
There is something to ferret out, an answer to find but I'm unable to track the clues.
A man leans over the half-door of his maltsters home, fizz of snowy hair and broad grin hinting at Lewis Carroll.
It's almost mid-day but stars: insubstantial as snail-trails, fiery as dreams, dance with the sky. They died before the first hut of this village was made, before the Pobble came.
The air is sweet and nutty. Centuries ago the abbots of Glastonbury summered here.
Old man's beard and blackthorn, enormous balls of mistletoe rung-up like bells in all the apple trees, held in balance.
I shall sit in the bell tower this evening as you practise, my feet together and still as an angel so I'm not snatched up by a sally, hurled from the open top of the tower.
(for Hedwig Brouckaert)
whatever grey is it isn't black or a white mouse it isn't a field or a buzzard it isn't the mouth of a carp or catfish and it isn't an anaconda
grey is skyonskyonsky wrapped in grey I am safe held am all that is
and the fizz and sparkle of a firework the flame and the scarlet and the sequin-light slippers the mosses in the forest the snail the lily bud
people who trudge and shuffle who pass me by unseeing
have not recognised that the skin on my neck is smiling the muscle of my mind boogies.
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