We three boys
would trawl boggy fields
well up to welly boot depths
and over
to heel and toe squelch home
from draining ditches
of dark unknowns
never measured before
by mankind
those unlit sinkholes
of fervent imaginations
each fed by slowed streams
of red Martian water
that oxide bleeding
so bloody it could be
the earth rusting inside
too much for life
and from that ditch
I lifted a fossil leaf
a tyre track of time
embedded into rock
as if left by God on a bike.
My father died
aged fifty-five,
I was aged
twenty-three,
he slipped away
at St. Peter’s:
My mourned dusk
then came back,
as I was buried
in the haunted dark,
under the canopy
in Buxted Park,
back to his story,
as we three ducked
through the woods
on St Anne’s Hill,
our fears fostered
by his ghost story.
Past that rough triangle
off Heath Road, Weybridge,
a slow junction lined
by gloom-slimmed birches,
these woods we all knew
as the murder patch,
where a woman was killed,
his low theft gone wrong,
and a foul faked rape
by other thrust means,
(facts then unknown):
we kids were alive to
her near place of death,
there scoured by detectives’
metal detectors:
and we looked for shadows
on every pass,
we innocents whelped
on his criminal act.
There to see my father,
propped-up in a polished box,
one that my eldest brother,
chose, on the basis of, what?
Death was still too sour to us,
the parlour’s air throat-clogging,
this feared place of passing youth,
ten yards from the level crossing:
Often halted by its turned gates,
& scouring spin of wheels,
on our way in and out of town,
with Dad & his thousand skills:
he could dissect a battleship,
break apart any gun,
extemporize upon anything,
with sketch & rule of thumb.
Now boxed-in, he tarried,
we’d leave him, lonely, there:
my brother could not stand
the parlour’s execrable despair:
In that time, almost gone,
I learnt about death’s prop:
that last lesson from my father,
& our paths no longer crossed.
There to see my father,
propped-up in a polished box,
one that my eldest brother,
chose, on the basis of, what?
Death was still too sour to us,
the parlour’s air throat-clogging,
this feared place of passing youth,
ten yards from the level crossing:
Often halted by its turned gates,
and scoured spin of wheels,
on our way in and out of town,
with Dad, and his thousand skills:
he could dissect a battleship,
break apart any gun,
extemporize upon anything,
with sketch, and rule of thumb.
Now boxed-in, he tarried,
we’d leave him, lonely, there:
my brother could not stand
the shop’s execrable despair:
In that time, almost gone,
I learnt about death’s prop:
that last lesson from my father,
our paths no longer crossed.
