Man sitting in a garden near to Lukely Brook
I’d be an old man but for medicine,
watching each climbing leaf against
local stone, tracing a time line
defying the weight of silt and shit,
seeking, if not the stars, the light,
the sense of means possessed outside
of time, seasons a sleeper stirring,
rising or burrowing through strata
of a dream, building memories to mulch
new experience and let it grow to strength.
One becomes reconciled to and used
to the way things are imposed by force
of circumstance and greed, the same
vector in almost all caution.
The river, now reduced by theft,
still flows on the bottom of the valley.
Up is still up and down still down.
Gravity works and so too decay.
These directions of Holy Spirit
in whom I do not much believe
nor ever did except as trained
espaliered upon class walls,
a drip feed in my head, measured
and violent, its pain accommodated:
Wrong Way. Go Back. Do not Belong
I think of Gascoyne, close to Parkhurst
This narrow belt of liveable fields
chalk down and lowland forestry
and then the turbulent ocean
and further north ground wildernesses
no one will ever grasp or love.
It is an exile from all continence
where the animal rules or dies.
Here in the south, the sun is kind.
Things change but mostly say the same,
Gascoyne the poet who knew much
and put it to some distinction,
letting his word take root and spread
until it was forgotten, all
forgotten, what had been said mounds
overgrown, taken for surface features,
some such are not recognised ever,
left to fall from encroaching cliffs
in millennia I would not care to count.
There’s too much for us to learn now,
too many of us, the time short.
The world keeps going. Gascoyne is dead.
All that’s irretrievable. But here
the butterflies are numerous.
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