Refuge Read Online Free

shifting shadows
    a rotund figure who might be
    hunter, butcher, cook or wrestler,
    cuts up a carcass, sculpting out
    joints and chops with delicate art,
    at one with his task and himself.
    Nearby in sheltered, green dell
    long, low thatched hut, walled
    in wood and wattle. Its doorway
    profiles a busy, slender woman
    coarse-gowned, raven hair tied aside,
    shimmering like breeze-blown foliage.
    What account would they take
    of some dusty, wandering drudge
    who combs a wilderness for days,
    chances a ruin to exchange
    his nowhere for somewhere else?

FLIGHT
    1.
    A 747 oddly low for here.
    Caught in 8-mag monocular
    helpless floundering white belly
    puffs vapour scattered into crumbs,
    four engines pitched uncertainly
    between
head for land
or
soar
    and chance it in empty air
.
    Air-beached whale! Last
    of its species about to
    go extinct on touch-down.
    Who can be aboard? Look for
    portholed heads filled with
    endless blue or capsized green,
    each looking for more than is there.
    2.
    In forest dusk two Muntjak bolt with crackling thuds
    over coppiced litter, turn stealthy,
    flashing white arse from
    trunk to trunk,
    pause,
    pick up caught breath
    and crepitating shoulder,
    slip along thread-needle pine trail
    as the watcher cranes to sift hide from bark.
    3.
    In semi-darkness
    stiff breeze shakes tatters.
    Something amber dances in brambles.
    Maybe a stray tag for rough shoot lot, rented
    sliver of copse to stand all weathers and pick off
    overfed fowl panicked by beaters into air, their last resort.
    Fooled by a ragged balloon! Stretch its logo
    and read
Malvern Scout Group
, just one
    of jamboree helium-fuelled, bobbing
    flights from a hundred miles
    west of here, address tag
    for kind return
    still attached.

RESORT
    I bus back to azure days of rock and sand
    when dark seas pummelled walled bays,
    children holidayed to bathe and dig,
    feasted on sandwiches, hadn’t learnt
    to spend or felt the fear of missing out.
    Alone up front on top I spot
    a purple smudge beyond rising hills
    that edge the sea in concave cliffs.
    A black tor’s wind turbine scythes
    my landscape with maddening blades.
    Tree-smacked the double-decker drops
    into sheer-sided valley as if I drive
    with abandon, lean into blind bends,
    thread bottlenecks towards a stone town
    that glints through thinning woods.
    As we buck and brake at lights or road-works
    I look up past fat-frying bars and gift shops
    at faded Victorian hotels with their portals,
    bay windows displaying well-spaced tables,
    tall bedrooms behind nets and draped curtains.
    I alight where strollers zig-zag up and down
    shorn slopes that end in fenced-off crags
    colonised by grunting, stiff-winged fulmar.
    Far below a paddle steamer waits
    to wallow out round long-deserted islands.
    Not much footage unwinds from this patchwork
    but here’s a sandy inlet of barnacled rock
    where we sat braced against wind and spray.
    Reading
Bel Ami
, I laughed at something flagrant.
    What’s up
,
Daddy
? (Don’t Fathers know better?)

BELONGING
    (
For Cathy
)
    I.
    We’re trimming stalks and husks
    in a strip-light sunset, earth
    sodden, moss-filmed, passive.
    Your fifth autumn. You sift
    my debris as if it’s treasure,
    neatly load the old barrow,
    ask if mosquitoes dance
    up and down spiders’ webs.
    A question I needn’t spoil thanks to
    rooks lolloping west to roost
    miles beyond our hedged horizon,
    in twos or threes, some silent,
    intent on return, some so gorged
    with croaking chatter they slew off
    course and swivel idly back.
    And wouldn’t you love to join them!
    If they were scissors, you say,
    there’d be holes in the sky.
     
    What’s it like to be a rook?
    “An ugly crow with pale face and beak.
    Some might call you farmer’s friend
    but who’d want to live or work
    near a woodful of yackers like you?”
    Easier said than what it might be like:
    caught at dusk without a perch,
    to drill at teeming fallow, mine for maggots,
    shriek into dawn quarrel, taste
    dry tongue as frost