FOUR SEASONS
Spring
Time will soon tell but my best guess is this year
will be our last here, where we need more room
for ourselves and also to be ourselves together -
although not to be calling the place our own,
and worse still the garden… I cannot decide yet
how to finish that thought before the fact happens
but it wakes me early all right and here I am now
opening our long window onto the spring sunrise
as it establishes the dewy cranes and scaffolding
of King’s Cross, then creates from the top down,
starting with the pale pink flowering cherry tree
and the darker more clotted and turbulent apple,
the quarter-acre where we have looked one another
straight in the eye and known that we are happy.
Summer
Neither will I ever forget the young mulberry tree
whose shadow I am lazing in since time allows
to see the summer sun through half-closed eyes
fall in streaks and scrapes like trickles of white sand
before turning my whole attention to the tree itself,
which I have known since it was the height I am,
and could now clamber into if I wished, to vanish
beneath the protection of its large and papery shields
as easily as if I were ordinary rainwater or sunlight
but in fact to feel myself extended from the earth
in a hard tall fountain of bark and fruit and leaves
that neither of us, given the nature of its sweet returns,
not to mention the steadiness with which it maintains
its balance in the world, can easily believe is dying.
Autumn
The robin that all summer has been concealing himself
in ivy-castles towering along the end wall of the garden,
nesting there, then sheltering the ostentation of his breast
and the darker blaze of his curious and acquisitive eye,
has now broken cover to speak from the apple tree
as I rake the grass beneath, though whether his words
are opinion or advice, or simply the coil of his identity
unwinding I cannot decide, any more than I can be sure
if it is the way his music recollects for me the other years
I have stood under other trees to gather up their leaves,
or just the bitterness of knowing I shall never see spring
put leaves on this tree in particular again, or thinking how,
in time too easy to imagine, tree and leaves and singing bird
will disappear, that makes me sink under the weight of air.
Winter
Frost settles so rarely here, when it suddenly does tighten
the already-pink-tipped bumps on the cherry and apple tree,
and slips a filigree sleeve along the still-bare mulberry arms,
we step outdoors immediately and hand in hand like children
with the world before us, although or because we understand
it will not be in this place and may perhaps be nowhere else
we see this again, lacking time as we do, and feeling time
exhausts itself at the end of every season, not least today
under this bare sky where a solitary passenger plane catches
the only light, cold by these cold trees, and on this ground
where the crisp tracks of our footprints are perfectly obvious
as long as the frost lasts, but insignificant and pointless except
they prove that we appeared to see the beauty of the day
and stood still together, before the sunlight wipes them away.