On your right by the benches and bus stop, part I
I wake on Friday after only four hours, my body setting back its clock
The moon sits on the rooftop, opposite
Two rabbits, smudges in the field to my right
A dove I can’t see in a tree to my left
Pheasants talk to each other here, nearby, over there
Mist,
bells,
birdsong,
thick and light and full and fluid, every which way I turn
I walked here from the station five days ago
Words, like life, by turns as unyielding as the stone wall wedged between my folded feet and the grass running fast to the stream in the trees at the bottom of the field on the hill,
By others,
A steady rising.
The moon is now set
The sky, soapsuds and lemon curd
It is Saturday, the second day, the quietest of the three
Just behind that last, long, low wall you see from the terrace when you look to the right (and the mill), a deer has appeared. She is grazing
Her back and her rump melt into the stone’s palette, ash and burnt citrus.
Now she finds the gap in the wall
Now she wanders across, nose to the grass and the morning
Now she is here
Slight
Still
She knows where she is
Numb
The stone wall’s cold shifts to my elbows and my stomach, my thighs, her ears,
She is just beyond the last, long, low wall to the left now,
Ears hovering above it, commas in a poem
Silently, this deer has done – and this she will not know – what the trains in my park do and had me turn with her as she has passed from way to the right (and the mill and the source) to way to the left (and the cottage and the bridge)
I get up from the wall
A pheasant shudders its wing with something like thunder, and the station and Easter Sunday,
They take the deer’s place
On your right by the benches and bus stop, part II
gathered in the room
with the green velvet cushions
were a dolly lady,
a plumber,
a carver, a ghost,
a socialist,
a draughtsman,
a careful manager,
a neighbour,
a towering wit,
a kindness,
a healing brain, a ready laugh, a shy pianist,
a hungry reader,
a ready put down,
a pair of yellow socks, a pair of dancing hands,
a set of folding, leathery, stubbled cheeks,
eyes that contain all the mischief,
eyes that can see the woods dying,
a woolen hat, a leather jacket,
eyes that cried,
eyes in black eye liner,
eyes that look like Phoebe Waller Bridges’s eyes
sixteen pairs of steady feet to walk down an unpaved road with,
and two pairs of the safest, surest hands
On your right by the benches and bus stop, part III
You follow the sound of someone walking
The full length of the long kitchen worktop
Against which you lean
Your left hip
Stirring whole milk into hot tea
Bare feet sinking into soft ruby pile
On your right by the benches and bus stop, part IV
We sit on wooden benches at a table, a ship
grab at fears the size of a burning cathedral
We come up short
they lose their bearings,
we bite bullets
they spall
We sit tight, drive like rain, wrestle words on to lignin
Timbers half-sawn give up their sap, their metal
Ground moist and verdant seeps, cloying, into mouths
as slow red lines climb, plume patterned, from feet part iron, part clay
We scale the tall chimney, climb to her grave, are greeted by a mother and a milky boy, a metal worker, a dying man, a crofter,
a cop,
a kid,
a puzzle
even as the great forest itself (two thousand oaks, six leaden bells, a single arrow)
gives up both heft and frame
and falls,
upwards
and into
a scatter plot
as immaterial
as prayer