Versione Italiana | Nota biografica | Versione lettura |
In this country, nature is green on green.
In mine, green grows out of ochre, fawn, dun –
what are the colours of dust? Caught between
fruit trees, what are they but shifts of the sun?
In this country, grass and tree are implicit
in each other, as in water. In mine,
dust and tree are awkward friends who elicit
only the same blessings at the same shrine.
But it’s dust that deepens shadows, the tree
that plays on colours watermarked by shade.
When shade is deep as water, roots drink deeply,
and drinking from the same pool, friends are made.
If only we were dust and tree. My children,
grown from my poor soil. I imagined Eden.
When someone sits on your bed
and strokes your hair for a long while
then quietly leaves,
though you feel the mattress
relinquish weight that anchored you
and float unsafe on a surface
that is even but seems to tilt,
though you hear him go, your loyalty
is now less to love than to night and day
whose death and resurrection
you are made
implicit in.
It’s a night for nostalgia he said.
I felt I was missing something, some
echo of nights we must have shared
in separate alleyways, far off home
rain drew him back to, or clouds,
or the particular light behind rain.
I was nostalgic for words, last words
of a poem I would read on the train.
There was a power cut today. I lit
three candles, ate lamb and read
by candlelight. The beauty of it
was too lonely so I went to bed.
It rained then. In the daylight dark.
I lay there till I heard a click
and voices. When the lights came back
it was like a conjuring trick –
there they were, the animated creatures
of my life I had thought inanimate
objects. And I was the one conjured
out of their dream of a dark planet.