And as you wave goodbye
I know we shall not meet again
either here or earnestly
in another place beyond this pain.
I see your foxy face
disappear around a corner and
in perfect helplessness
raise my disappearing hand.
Dawn
The tree’s inside
a nest of orange light
as if it were a brain
on fire with all the thoughts
that make it shake and burn –
you in your neat iron
infernal suit, going home
to the house where I once was
set in the green grass
but very distant now.
Come, take my hand,
be more authoritative. Understand
I am only a poor simple lunatic
come from the land of fruit into this brick
undernourished cage. And what I speak
has as little meaning as the creak
of a wooden door: or a bird’s voice,
low, throaty, and anonymous.
I am of the world’s refuse, scarecrow man
set to protect a decent field of corn
amid that autumn music. But my own
notes are a steady strawy monotone.
The lunatics are forking autumn leaves
into a barrow (such bare grizzly heads!).
The sky is cold and wintry and bright blue.
They work relentlessly but they speak no words,
the eternally deranged ones. Leaves at least may change
from green to gold and back to green again
but there’s no change in their crew-cut hazy globes.
They’re sweeping leaves away in the vast ward
of this great daylight and the clouds are still
portentous castles high above their heads.
For them there’s only autumn and no spring.
The rain is falling. Poor Tom, poor Tom!
This is a dreadful landscape after the aplomb
of my early days. Come home to roost
are the fake alibis and the gross boast
settling on the wires. My dearest love,
wherever you are, cunning and piteous,
send me a picture I can look at, me
in your foxy eyes in miniature, now
reflected. Poor Tom, poor Tom!
Wind wanderer, rain sufferer, far from home!