To bugger off completely and drive north,
the breaking ocean on one side a tide
of greenblack rucks and rollings,
stormblown buoys and blue water lights
waved beneath a V of whooper swans
gliding into the hoar-lit horizon.
After reaching her rented cottage
she inhales the dusked air, then blows
it out, wrapped in woollywarm jim-jams
with iced whiskey, magazines and the crash-
splashed, long, withdrawing roar of the sea
rasping behind loose-rattled windows.
To get away, escape the boo-hoos,
tweets and managers, usernames,
traffic and troubles, the death toll
of twenty-four hour news, she fogs
her mind on a mountain of catalogues,
travel brochures, Chill-out Classics II.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are helping
children in Africa. The photo is so
beautiful, they float free from themselves,
free from the photo’s frame, blue eyes,
brilliant hair adrift over hills, over the sea.
She follows but falls, into the sea.
If she could only catch hold of herself
or seize each pulsed wave and mazed
aftermath twisting through her mind
she might know what to do, who to be,
the way things are. But everything glitters
for an instant and then snuffs it.
An expert in Time says the earth is all ground
zero now, and she knows there’s nowhere to go
but still, she’ll follow the glint of sorrel-
coated horses bounding through unhedged
greens towards blue surveilled horizons
hearing river water running underground.
She knows there’s nothing to do but try
and learn to love the spray of the coast’s
frowsty smacks of fast mazarine air,
privet and firethorn, the wind-rushed
barley and angelica, poplar groves
under the peach-blushed and gull-charged sky.
Like a child crying over a clump
of broken dolls, hoping to unmurder,
she’ll watch the endless waves reach
their limits, and walk through phantom air,
its contagion of blue, as starlings flusker
and flitch over fields of low barley
through gobsmacked garnet skies,
to alight on numbered trees, bursting out
of themselves, straining to reach up to
the death-flare of the sun, which multiplies.
But, for now, she lies back to sleep and dream,
enjoy the weekend. There is work to do.