Three Poems

I wonder if extreme old age

will be like this, the hours passing

like soft clicks of thumb and index finger.

Gossamer webs stretch with tiny knots

of midges caught there between the twigs

of our cotoneaster and cypress.

Ripe rose hips are strung like red beads

in an abacus that the briar makes

with brutal woody thorns and chaos.

Beyond our gate girls skip by fast

in dresses of peach-coloured muslin

on the way home from the Virgin’s feast.

Above them an aircraft dawdles,

a silver insect on the sky’s page

on its way west while I am fussed,

far though I live from the Black Sea, the North Sea

and the Baltic, by childhood thoughts of death

when I first saw the sea move then halt

at a point where I could never say

if the tide were flowing in or out.

This I write down breath by slow breath.

A ruined voice swaddled against a chill

holds forth on a bench beside the river

as other dilapidations gather round,

hands in their pockets, to nod agreement.

The river’s a silty acceleration

after some days’ rain, a flecked bistre brown

that gurgles pure Neanderthal vowels

and whispers sibilants no one can decode.

On the bank opposite, where proper nouns

walk their dogs, willowherb has lost its panache.

Osier and larch attempt an alchemy

to turn green to gold while an ancient god

sprawls on the grass with a bottle

not knowing what he is to be or to do.

The river’s jubilant as always after rain

with silt and error washed down from the hills

swirling together in the blurred speech of lovers

who scurry homewards, who now need nothing more

than the exclamation of silk and linen

discarded behind drop-dazzled private windows.

Such bliss excludes the hunter and his pack

whose wild passage bent iron rods at Candlemas

and clattered roof tiles from their trusses.

His pagan breath left a skim of ice that melted

at the sun’s first glimmer. Our windows are intact,

but the garden looks as though horses galloped through.

Who this ghostly visitation punished

is irrelevant. Small sins were committed

and left weather less troubling than the whirr

of ducks taking off into the misty air

which will disperse leaving the light, its azure

rhyming with impure, unsure and does-love-endure?