Winter comes to the northern plains, winds tearing the landscape, searing the leaves then stripping them. Rust is on the dust, an edge on the sedge and the party is truly over. Find me if you can in all this whiteness, in the cries of birds flying south, the patterns frost makes on the window’s glass. I’m here, somewhere. Find me.
The octet for strings, then applause like the rain. ‘Rain falls every day here in our lives, with fog from the river but rain chiefly on this rainy coast’: the barman telling his tales I listening to what I shall call his Reflection of a Tenpin Bowler: under his foot the bone growth and new hip are one with the pelvic swirl, stop, foot stamped down and away that ball went into a full deck, he made money that way, again turning to the optic and repeating but the rain, the rain on this accursed coast. St Petersburg that’s where he’d rather be, one day he says. Just switch on the TV, plug in the phone and the air conditioning and bet down the line. That’s living he says. Away from the endless rain.
Simple returns: we plant snowdrops, tulip, crocus and daffodils, against spring. Tom-next-door’s dead and his apples sour, and Johnny-two-doors-up was beaten and robbed, in this quiet neighbourhood. So where is that song I sang once, moments a bird homed in the sky and the river in its valley? Where did that poetry go to, a shore of only the waves’ long arrivals? It grows late and darker in the year, I grow older eating a poor man’s feast of beans for my supper, reluctantly.
Indian summer. The road flecked with gold, the plane trees full of birds, their songs flooding the sunset. ‘My heart is dying’ I say, testing it on the air’s autumn breath. I can’t see myself in these thickets, in so many voices I’ve lost my voice. The backyard fills with wind, with the odour of mints, rosemary, a shock of white heads is the cornflower. In the last of the foxgloves a last brown bee is still fumbling his music. Day by day it grows earlier late, the day’s end is blue, and gets closer and closer.