I’ve been especially impressed by the rooster;
sometimes I wonder if he has seen the future.
My father footers at something in the garden,
someone says something unimportant in the kitchen
to my mother’s usual, love-full clatter of pans,
rattled to within an inch of their life,
the Hollyoaks theme tune comes from the living room
as loud as you like, as if there was no tomorrow –
you cannot hear the tick of a clock here –
ironically, you wouldn’t catch me dead in there.
And tonight death seems like a million miles away
as I, perhaps, get closer to what it is I want to say.
And tonight the world feels like a million dollars,
and I feel the need for words like shebang,
arpeggio, carpaccio, Caravaggio,
piano, allegro, pimiento, bravado,
and in the garden everything seems so
abandoned, so easy-come easy-go:
the watering can has fallen on its side,
the daffodils are here, there and everywhere,
the spade against the ditch - a loner,
the deflated and faded Gilbert rugby ball,
unkicked, undrop-goaled, unconverted, un-tried,
tired, it lies beyond my brother’s jinking,
dinking, running-rings-around-me, scoring,
reminds me of the games we used to play, one-on-one,
garryowening, chipping and chasing
our life away on an evening like this evening,
thirsts slaked by big pints of Robinson’s Orange Barley Water,
a pause in play before we’d sidestep each other
until it couldn’t get any darker,
(older now, perhaps to grow is also to outgrow;
older now, we find ourselves homesick at home)
as now my nephews’ Disney slide is folded, horizontal
on the patch of grass it will keep from the rain and kill,
and beside the pampas grass beside the greenhouse
the midges seem left to their own devices:
a swarm of small sun-gods hovering en-masse,
up to no good, a swathe of sunlit nuisance,
and the robin, alone, skitters through the leylandii
from one branch to another branch, inching,
shaking, then steadying, shaking, then steadying,
and I, for the life of me, can’t tell you why

5

  

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