BST – day one
as seen from this flint field

high above the Winterbourne’s
pinned course

above rushes off a distant bypass –
that continuous inland tide

Here I listen for reduced birdsong
as seagulls are distance-summoned

by the hip-jiggered tractor’s
turn of furrow in another flint field

You have walked on – bent to misery
with me left here to rest

above this valley in our landscape –
with an extra hour of light

as if the clocks
had stopped
you leave me and sulk

We lay spooned,
upstairs, under the duvet
for half an afternoon,
as Ian Macmillan
ran to time
on Radio Four:

The lowered summer sky
dumped an excuse,
an inch in an hour,
and other weather news,
giving us
a lame excuse.

I kicked at the summer
along the bosky path,
punting insects and scents
with each measured step
through spiteful nettles
and over-reaching weeds:
I was forced to dip, to avoid,
the slap of weighted branches,
pulled apart by my leading
companion, let to whiplash,
without malice, on this walk
through the dense end of June,
where the nature of things 
had been thickened by rain:
Here the blackberry blossom
advertised an abundant crop,
here the small dog had to leap
to make her own way through
the viscid grip of grasses
on the rooted public path
of stings and itchy skin.

A few weeks back,
this summer,
and I would be stood
in a mist,
but this ridiculous
month of June
offers no such
cool sleights
as I stick-click,
lop-sided, alongside
the sucked-slouch
of the muddied Uck;
then hollered at
by the diesel’s sad call
as it sights
the unattended crossing,
and all the time,
across Manor Park,
bedroom windows are flung
in an un-English surrender
to the day’s heat
still found in bricks,
as the padding fox,
so thin,
sets off the estate’s
choir of panting dogs.

It arrived in the night,
thickened, from within,
that sulking infection
of continental heat,
not the slimmest hint
of a breeze to relieve
us, laid out, moribund
on our double bed,
with kicked-off duvets
and a great distance,
because we are rolled
from each others’ heat.

I love you – hope meeting going well x
A text from his phone, pecked, auto-spelt.

Beyond the window, hinges bared to the heat,
he heard his boys’ repeat beseech:

Another game on the moss-marched lawn,
another day gone, a fatherhood mourned.

He fumbled with dinner, poured from a can,
which wrestled and spat in the unstirred pan.

Kids don’t eat salad, his menu approved,
he returned to his fill of exterior views,

of summer stretching, there below,
of the day reeling in, of longing shadows.

He called them to wash, hollered from the house,
the garden relaid by their boots on the mat.

As a fight broke out in the downstairs bog,
he travelled, returned, to his brother’s love,

that punch of youth, tested again and again,
of everything around them, a smaller world then,

no internet, no screens, no loose connections.
He put food on their plates, and matched expectations.