Where is best to live after all?
Down that lane gone by in a flash,
perhaps, the kind that sires a blind twist
or two, that shoots long drives
to houses that must have built themselves
when summer wasn’t looking –
then gives up and folds under tipsy fences
and rising splashes of grass.
Or round the back
of that lipless jug on the garden-room sill,
set down and forgotten
on the way from kitchen to tip,
that turns a blue escutcheon
to the uncaring day
and suffers heat and cold
to go halves in worming its glaze.
Or in the moment
when you can no longer hear
a pleading voice and a car
tearing off in low gear
or the tears of a child
who’s been told they have to go
or can never come back
or after the last words
of someone you always thought you knew
but who in an instant
has laid off humanity
like a coat of shovel-armed fit
and is now a stranger
a work of ice
and dashes away all you meant to them
as though it was so many cluster-flies
where fruit outruns its season
and must sink
into its slow disfashioning.
