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Horse Chestnuts are the first to go, golden leaves. Then Sycamore, contrasts, crimson, Plasma one drop every fifteen seconds. Iron to red and back again, all the stages between. Chartreuse, ochre, platelets. I am leafing through changes, picking up the fallen ones. Mystery tours, on, off the grounds, or just, Look at that brushstroke, yellow dabbling with green. Look at the light. Listen. Never again that leaf to fall. Never again that leaf.
My day begins with copulation, lying on my back studying clouds, watching gulls on the rooftop across the way. Oh they’ve got their foreplay, as close as beak-ed things come to kissing. Peck-pecking, doing a dainty dance around each other in that almost-flamenco way. As close as they get to hugging, and so and so. Tap tap, slap slap on the tiles awhile, then enough of that, as he takes off, graceful lands atop her, a showy span of white wing, doing the jiggery-pokery thing. She’s uninvolved, looking down at her feet, thinking she needs to see a podiatrist, psychiatrist. It’s all too much, all this fuss and feathers just to end up sitting on a nest like all the rest. Common, one of the flock.
Smell of banana bread warming itself to golden brown moist inside, walnuts, the ones baby Sally always picks out. Old wood and eucalyptus, steady thud of grandfather's clock, the lazy pendulum. Coffee on the drip. A sea of calm drifts through you, the quiet that comes when you know you're home, safe place where you can or not be as still as that squirrel on the branch of the mossy oak. The piano plays ragtime in another room, switches to a lullaby, shushing all the bad dreams back into the cotton sweet closet. You know where you are in the soft bed, the same paintings, same photographs, all your life, all their voices. You won't want to leave this place, ever. A sister's love will wrap such strong arms around you, murmur, it's okay, it's all right and for a flash of a moment you believe her, your life depends on it.
The house shrinks and stretches, sighs at night creaking the floorboards, top of the house, crow's nest, light and air, walls bare. Slice of heaven we agreed, lazy rocking evenings, day's work done, ascending to meet the sun, watch it go down in a smother of clouds. Some laws of nature still persist. Sod's law, the rain on your parade, your barbecue, wedding, laundry, deck chair, bacci, papers. The minutiae of it all. Things. What are they without people but relics to be studied by archaeologists. A ribbon surviving flesh, faint lavender. A shank of auburn hair without a head. Gallstones in a jar, his and hers. Note: his were bigger than his mum's. Curiosities to be puzzled over trying to put it all together. What sense? Yes, I still take stones to your grave site to confuse them. Pink toned, blue grey, granite. Stones from Alderney, Carteret, Cromer, Norwich, Aldeburgh, Duluth, Dartmoor, Leide, a cobblestone from Praha that I'd like to think Mozart stubbed his toe on, that tripped Kafka, who swore as I did, the third time round. Round and round, lost amongst the ever changing streets.
this poem and others is available for listening to at "Writers' Hub", Podcast December 2004 (ed. Les Robinson), ISBN No. 1 904551 19 X |
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