There’s a cold sky and gulls in the new ploughing
And ice on the stretched water glazing the fields.
The year’s nearly done and I’ve not once taken this train till now
Not sat at this window, back facing the future
Watching the landscape unravel into what’s gone.
Your death knocked the thrive out of me
Knocked the thrive out of the year as well
The sky is spreading itself out and breaking open
The way that sometimes a poem does, or music, or light. All my life I’ve been trying and trying.
This full-mooned daylight is thin and cold
as the smell of a lemon
And I’m tired of fretting the mind over mysteries
I am nearly ready to give up and not understand
There’s an ash by a wall in a field above our house.
I go there in the season to find you in the empty branches
In the way the tree stands to the sky
The dogs quarter, snouts dropped to the smell that has them by the nose
I’m not far off that myself - hard on the scent when the bird has gone.
This is the holiest week of the year,
this descent into dark, into the formless heart of the matter
Our souls enter our bodies, hungry for experience
They run us around like the mice that live in the skirting and skitter across the floorboards in the stillness
Their quick, sure darts scoring the emptiness behind my gazing the eyes
I am travelling, am moving in stillness.
I am sure travelling in a train to bliss nest.
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