You can walk with me
along another path
It’s not too far
but be aware of fallen trees
Watch for twisted boughs –
turned like a lover’s thighs
crossed – coyly – enough
to keep to wedding vows
An overnight layering of leaves
masks raised roots
A wild rose curls – armed
with thorns bared like teeth
Without broken clouds
there is less to see –
no backlit leaves
to play out a sideshow
It is this gate now
Scores of lady’s gloves reach
out on this chain sawn patch
whilst less urgent saplings
have slower ambitions
There a sometimes-killing –
but also useful – fungi
sprouts from a rot-set
silver bough
You see it too –
but as a foreign shell
washed up far from tides
without a limpet’s blind tenacity
I tell you – it is also known as
razor strop fungus –
due to its rough edges –
many lost uses – like fire carrying
We crush this season’s litter
stopping at bright busting
sweet chestnuts –
buffed peel-able virgins
to be split by my heeled
crush – to an extraction
Along our crackling path
of bitter acorns – those
discarded ancient fruits
of last week’s storm –
we see where swung blades of gusts
broke a woodsman’s coppice
The parallel profiles
of the fifty to sixty linden trees
are bitten-thin by the wind
at this time of year
but their ever-tall alignment
of bared trunks
is still my local fixture
There – spaced by landed
strides off an owner’s count –
along this now hemmed-in route –
once a sublime wide avenue
to a grand house –
ridden up forty-ish years earlier
by a princess –
Sporting Life by her side
Now it is the route to a
sprawled estate
of modern servants
who push their buggies
and pull their dogs
along the uneven surface –
a shaded path
for the good half of the year –
for the other bared months
it is fifty to sixty sundial
shadows – if there is sun –
I haven’t counted the trees –
each a timer set by a lime
in the low winter light
I stand under this vault
of our common church –
off-centre on this sea-girt isle
Our stone tradition of roofing
is more to do with fools’ fires
than Heaven’s weight
Here the light is insipid –
no tang of incense
only the blue miasma
off flume emissions
My legs tire – but find no pew –
no tuffet to take me
to the path’s cathartic
kneel-down call
Through this sludge-week
before your lit Yuletide –
this path of slopped rain
sucks hard on my boots
as I traipse in my circles
of the dog-dug conditions –
through which I’m set fast
by your barked-out orders –
Only return home
with a well-cut one –
which will not then tip –
not ’til the twelfth day –
Such held superstitions –
erected by lost Popes –
were claims on short nights
over our pagan ways –
I’d rather keep cold gods
from the warm living room –
I hold no love
for your desiccated tree
