In the end, we withdrew from the city
for an end to the constant commotion,
window-size skies, absence of seasons;
and have found a place near the ocean
which doubles the skies, where seasons
come on the winds, wild flowers mark
time by the roadsides and sunsets travel
in their southwest northwest arc along
the rim of our world.
We retreated from the relentless traffic
of development to the slow roll of years,
from the thrash of city-life to the quiet
resonance of internal and external nature.
Where his eyes rest,
on the floorboards;
where the sun is landed,
a light on the life passed;
silence deep;
memory flattened by sadness
dead on that floor;
dead in that torpor.
Where his eyes rest,
in that stripped room;
a perfect square
a cold square.
The fields hemmed in by hedgerows green with thorn and briar;
by cloud, stream and drain;
May’s champagne celebration:
the exquisite snow of hawthorn’s white blossom.
The soft pillowed hills latticed with limestone walls
built of lichened white moons;
the cloud-mediated light
spread evenly across the expanse of heaven and earth.
The poles that carry the wires
that carry conversations humming by the roadsides;
the roads that flow like streams from the town,
eventually bending into unseen countryside.
The world that is not known
the darknesses beneath sycamore and ash,
the guessed at activities of slinking foxes and shuffling badgers;
the forests and cities, the peoples out beyond those hills.
To the child at the window,
a universe without borders or boundaries,
understood as it is imagined,
as free as it is wide.
Peopled since the Bronze Age;
now, pots and pans, tables and chairs,
they left the island,
left it a great yawning emptiness.
But old Thomas Lacey was not to be moved;
not while the spirits of his boatman sons
coursed the island’s winds; their bodies, perhaps,
still rowing back from Bofin.
And when all were gone,
and no October lights shone from the windows,
he set the fire, made dinner for himself and his sons
and left the door ajar.
He ate alone;
the great hungry tide reverberating across the island,
answerless and unrepentant;
he sat with dwindling hope, then went to bed.
But they came later in the night;
strong, smiling and unchanged after all the years.
They had rowed their boat home to their gleaming island;
and built a house that would forever be close.
Next morning, he woke to peace.
The wind across the island carried the salt of the sea;
he looked over to Bofin; it was as it had always been
and would be without him.
In hazel twilight,
an avalanche of white thorn
hanging above our heads.
Night lights of bluebells
thick around our feet;
faint silvery gleam of lake
between the trunks of trees;
birdsong all around.
Ancient walls
of moss-softened stones,
traces of a lifestyle that once was;
hand-built scripts
disappearing in evening's light,
time's amnesia,
nature's shroud.
Cryptic, disconnected
from their meanings;
too remote from their builders
for poignancy;
we stop a moment,
admire a bend on the pathway,
white-petalled, luminous.
The dresser:
axe-heads, bone needles, stone dice,
flint knives, beads, limpet and whelk shells.
My mother’s plates with nowhere to go;
the silver’s in the attic. And that mahogany table:
unuseable without doilies.
In time the soil will shift;
more sandstone dressers will be found,
and so too the broken pocket-watch she gave me .
