Remembrance

Burial

The still, calm silence of the morning
Breaks into hammering – hard,
Sharp and ringing – metal on metal:
Somewhere in a neighbouring garden
I guess someone is driving a length
Of steel bar or pipe into the earth –
Some demanding physical undertaking
Is moving to a thought completion.

It might be a kind of wedding day:
A series of vows, sounded in consciousness,
Put into contest with time and chance;
And human will, in this endeavour,
Will – if not prevail in some eternity –
At least have set its decision free
To sound upon the air, amidst
The twittering of disturbed birds.

The thing now under construction –
Whatever it is – demands of its maker,
It’s fair to suppose, less than a lifetime
Of commitment: it will be sufficient
To its purpose, bring just reward
At its finishing, and one morning
Like this, will be of no consequence
To others, even something to remove.

The hammering is intermittent, the sun
Is gaining warmth, the birds I heard
Are silent, and the one who gave her all
To me and to our children is buried –
Lowered into silence – and her death,
Seemingly as definite as our vows,
Turns full of ambiguity: not unlike
This invisible activity of creation.

Morning

The shadow of an aircraft speeds over the garden –
A fleeting change of light enveloping the house –
And the morning shade returns as fast to its own pace
And place, perception of the present fades, and time
Resumes its unremarkable motion in the un-regarded
Creep of sunlight and its edge across the lawn.

How bright these days are: the long full sunshine
Bleaches the hydrangeas, robs the grass of green,
And every event, alteration, is as it should be
In cycle or progression: in which the summer sun,
In its work of desiccation, and the passengers, now
Far from here on their journey, are equally a part.

Why not acceptance then, that this is all there is,
And your death as absolute a passing away as that
Momentarily overhead or the shrivelling of a plant?
But can that be? Can there be nothing left of you?
No, there is not, cannot be, nothing – although –
Although – you gone – half my life seems ended.

No, love – your love – must endure, even here
In this desolation, with what was the whole of you
Departed, what was presence turned to vacancy:
For the kind of love you gave, that you promised
At our start, and fulfilled, is not of this emplacement:
It had – it has – no period, caprice, diminution.

So your love – not bound to time or place, but
Living still – is the image of another in its unworldly
Constancy, and must share in that oneness,
The conjunction of the present and the eternal
That filled your prayer, your worship, and be
Nothing that passes under the sun or from the earth.

Keys

Those in my pocket mark time with my walking:
A clink at my thigh as my right leg steps forward –
The faster, the louder – silent here at traffic lights –
Thus does time become a thing of my own, and
My usually carried keys unlock meditation, open
Into words, have the reality in this they have here.

What exists except it moves into mind? – shifts,
Or is shifted, out of matter, out of the temporal,
The transient, into the substance of contemplation?
Then existence can be nothing simple, but depends
On composition of mind, and a key at hand may be
The wrong one, or the lock attempted set fast.

So I stand here at the lights – fingering an edge
Of milled metal teeth, trying a lock that will not
Give: beyond it a place or no place, wholly real and
Utterly unreal, neither known nor unknown, opened
For Gods, heroes, the God-sent – but no Virgil, no Beatrice
By me – and you have crossed to the other side.

Flight

A pair of sparrows alight on the fence,
Peck at the feathers on their breasts,
Until one darts into the air, and then –
Another moment – and both have flown:
The action and its perception finished.

They – the birds, events – have become
Thoughts: more than memories, but
Subjects for the mind to apprehend – turn
Over – where they join all things gone
From time into immaterial resurrection.

He who, crucified, would not stay dead
Is the model, triumph, of this displacement
Of physicality, rising as breath does
To bring life into other breasts
Otherwise insensible of this existence.

You had this belief in what’s immortal,
And it became you – was as oxygen
For your living – and now you have gone
Into this dislocated existence, to where
I cannot follow, or like a sparrow fly.

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