Refuge Read Online Free Page A

tightens.
    When
you’ve
flown elsewhere, I wonder,
    will you notice knots of black wings
    making for some distant comfort,
    and think of homing rooks and home?
    II.
    Your age again, I’m all weathers
    outside flint-rendered hotchpotch cottage
    near woods of towering beech and ash
    under rookery flight path, our bowed roof
    streaked white from its restless traffic.
    Look-outs cling to topmost twigs,
    welcome back wandering droves
    with all’s-well bark. The sound
    of permanence that makes it seem
    we’re planted deep in tree-lined shadows,
    though I long for roar and swell
    of thick-flocking autumnal spates
    when cackling jackdaws and shrill crows
    join the daily forage, return and squabble
    over where to ride out the night.
     
    *
     
    Above us now tail-enders mutter
    between wing beats, and I kneel
    to help you scrape up our cuttings,
    but I’m back among flattened bluebells,
    knees black with leaf-mould, to rescue
    fledglings flung from nests by gales
    before their first, haphazard flight.
    Never mind the blank stares and idiot squeals:
    they’re slop-fed in boxes by the coke boiler.
    Tossed into aerial trials they flounder,
    catch the knack, and never look back.

MOUNTAIN SUNDOWN
    Low, lingering Norwegian sun
    throws a birch pattern
    over wood-clad room.
    Most ponder their roaming day,
    share it with postcards,
    scribbling well-used phrases
    that insist on being said,
    miss the moment’s fullness
    when hard, clean light scrubs
    crags and brittle crests of trees,
    and its slow dwindling unveils
    clefts, groins, fine-hatched crannies.
    And beyond it all I’m seeing
    one distant once-loved woman
    sigh before her mirror,
    expectant or listless about
    an evening out, testing herself
    against invasive light,
    trying to shun the moment’s weight.

AFTER THE SINGING
    She lodged above a freezer shop.
    He stood below her on the first dark step
    beyond strip lights illuminating bargain buys.
    Their concert so long rehearsed
    with indifferent voices, was over.
    Where should they go next?
    Communal zest softened a broken past,
    weekly shelter, somewhere to rub shoulders.
    She shook and cried. He longed for her
    to turn to him, sensing but not seeing
    her morbid inwardness and taut temples.
    He needed to cherish a crumpled face.
    “I’ve been badly hurt. It ruins trust”,
    she said. “I’m the one who’s always hurt,”
    he said, feeling but not believing it.
    Months later caught in the snare
    of getting by and tired by devotion
    that hadn’t begun to heal her pain
    she caught him unawares, hit him,
    he felt, with what he’d said too easily,
    before they stumbled up those dark stairs.
    He traced the mean corners of her mouth,
    flinched from a fretful soprano full of rancour,
    and to hold his own, crassly declared:
    “So...
Tempting fate
is more than just a cliché.”
    She consulted her watch, looked away
    and said: “at least I’ve let you down gently.”

THE ASSUMPTION
    ......this
    both the yeares and the dayes deep midnight is.
    ( John Donne: Nocturnal on St Lucies Day)
     
    I watch you
    file drudgery away
    on the night of the year’s least light.
    And I’m happy
    for your respite.
    Prospero’s staff is broken. Aerial-free you flit
    among cabinets, copiers, stationery.
     
    Do I walk with you
    in moon-clouded vault
    of the year’s midnight, or is it a trance?
    Every thought
    sways to a dance
    as you waver in your tiredness and take a chance
    with taunts and hints of affectionate sport.
     
    O we’ve talked,
    making every commonplace a comfort,
    unquiet encounters this night will now eclipse.
    Words cannot distort
    heartfelt release
    that says in no uncertain terms and not to please,
    being loved from head to toe’s your just desert.
     
    But here’s the lamp
    where we are duty-bound to part
    and night unlighted summons me away
    to play another part
    wearing hours away,
    while you tread a straight, neatly-lighted way
    with measured shadows that leave an undivided heart.
     
    O the lamp inquires
    and