Touching Base

I

It is a warm August day,
the kind that I would like for my last,
sucking it all in from the shade
of a double swing seat.

I am trying to recapture something,
but cannot. Home is America now
without pastel skies and clouds
of my youth, of my forming.

Texas is heat, space and isolation.
Birds there have flame feathers.
Green lizards snatch spiders unacquainted,

unlike the breeze that strokes my legs again,
that sweeps a dance of holly blue and white
butterflies above dahlias and verbenas
against crumbling trellis,
against wall of bricks
older than the dry bones of my forbears.

I want to sigh into the hollow
that separates memories
of the Englishness that made me English,
from the cynicism I wear these days
like misted spectacles.

II

Grey mullets that entertained visitors in Barcelona
followed me to Dawlish. It seems too humble
to support such illustrious display, such regal flesh
that taunts two fat fisher folk who dip and dab rag bait.

Yet, by testing a narrow wedge over the boat ramp,
these desirables appear to want to walk on land,
to transfigure, to cross coterminous edge
and interchange with their predators.

An olive fan of dorsal fin cuts surface ripples – begs.
Give me your strained back, your hirsute bloated skin
burnt with blue tattoos. Let me walk with grinding knees
and you may have my taut aerofoil of sleek agility.

III

The water in the pond is low, a sump,
crowded with buckled lily leaves
and two washed-magenta blooms.
On a table, swollen onions brown
for the garden show on Dawlish Lawn.
A stone owl watches me with fogged eyes
beneath sky I could not replicate
as a schoolboy artist – too pale,
with bits of cloud that ride the valley
and out to sea like smoke signals.

I look down slope of lawn, (crisp
from an English drought this year),
past mother’s sinking garden shed,
over an alley with graffiti and ivy,
beyond buff brick Masonic lodge
and taller trees behind, waving summer coats
in a sharp breeze to houses old and new,
white or terracotta that hug the far slope
with no more assuredness than stilted homes
I saw by the Amazon of Peru,

but here I am touching base,
for every particle of fabric
from loose shale that falls between fork tines,
to layers of roofs and trees,
sing to me with voices still ringing;
the accents and attitudes of dead teachers,
smoke-chaffed calls from my grandmother,
my father’s disillusion coated with sarcasm
or whispered words of new love
mingled in blades of summer grass.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 4th, 2006 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.