Such is the distance

Nature Notes

The light through its decline from beyond,
The slant of it
A sinking slope of gold and auburn,
The beach untouched;
Three canoeists are paddling
Or adrift in currents
And countless glittering blue
And white eddies and ripples.

Cameo of myself
Across a dune of yellow thyme
For the lunchbox and a surge of coffee.

Marketing thought –
Funny how not having
Looked at the present
Label made the first touch
Of the paste seem
Somebody was behind
Me, if not in front –
What a shock to the tastebuds.

Sapling clings to stone
To the left, first buds of
April and what I at first think
A bird’s nest at eye-height –
Debris from the swell and flood
Of winter. All is cold and
Tan red. Higher scrub
Shows grass and sacking
Eight feet above my head.
Strange to think I would
Have been underwater then.

And later, dry, ploughed and sown
Fields, wind tan, chemical taste
And salt… the dusky bitter
Winter warmth of nutmeg.


Tragic

Renya’s same darkening underpass
Of black stone, grit and shadow,
The darkening passage narrow
So she folds in both her elbows.

Renya was no one fast, I’d say.

Her head was suped up for a down,
A mulligatawny crown
Of the spiciest Tamil.
She was sure at a loss that day.

Renya was no one fast, I’d say.

Let’s face it, Renya was word-lost
Amongst reds, greens and in-betweens,
A myriad shrinking heads
Of their pharmaceutical dreams.

Renya was word-lost that day.

Renya’s same darkening underpass
Of black stone, grit and shadow,
The darkening passage narrow
So she folds in both her elbows.

Renya was word-lost that day.


Ashworth Litter

A pile of litter was then no more
Than urban slough, the shiny evidence
Of others without
Despoilation.

We took that faded upholstered train
On its tracks through cuttings into wilderness
Hard and grazing and worn,
Our first threadbare journey

Enough to reveal that life
Was not only torn from the known
But palpable, growing through its holes,
And this very nature was the stuffing

We had had knocked out of us,
It was only, but always the stuffing
And everything inside, nature beneath
The motley, faded green in beige sand

And blue volcanoes, it was everwhere,
Eruptive, soft but gritty and sharp
And we regained in that landscape
The inwardness we had lacked but found

We could tap with a scratch.
We realized the interior and marked it
As our own even as it had marked itself,
Untainted by the tidy brigade

Their crispbags emptied spoors
To now distant fingers,
Drained and twisted cartons
Tiny monumental facts


Anon.

'I was there in '84 - and the Lesser Quarter.'
An anonymous internet-post preys on my mind
As lightly as an enigmatic postcard, unsigned,
But dimly illuminating a shrouded past
With her 'fondly' lingering, without parting the dark
As though her own memory cheats mine - for a lark -
Such is the distance between St. Andrews and Prague.