A Window

Now I am not I,

Nor is my house now my house

‘Romance Sonambulo’, Garcia Lorca

He was sitting at a window

Watching the hour resolve itself

From the night’s black scrawl

To a muted green of dawn,

Listening

To the house

Coming back to life

In the morning’s pale cold.

The morning greeting him

With a stilled garden

Caught in the lure

Of autumn’s chill air.

Overnight, rain fell like lead,

Silvering the thatched lawn.

The beech hedge threaded

and interwoven by roiling coils

Of bramble. In the beds,

Apologetic poppies

Shaking sorry bonnets.

In the earth, worms ooze.

His eyes lit upon an apple tree

Planted by an unknown hand

Barely capable of bearing fruit

Its branches chafe

As if for warmth, like two hands

Over a hearth. Its neighbour

With one or two still clinging on:

Rotting baubles pecked by rooks,

Carcasses littering the grass,

Eviscerated carrion

And turning brown,

Left to spoil and seed.

He was sitting at a window

Looking upon a world

That was not his to know

A world being reformed

By the sun’s steady hand.

A garden which was like

A room of the mind

In a house returned to life.

Portrait of my grandparents

They’re an unusual pair.

Him gangly and goofy, a string-bean Swede,

In jacket and trousers that don’t match.

Her diminutive and compact, blonde curls.

The farm-girl glamour she never lost.

Smartly dressed in Sunday best,

They might be off to church,

Or his father’s coaching inn, or else

Pushing the boat out a bit,

Taking a trip in a borrowed car

Or her father’s horse and trap,

On a road to who-knows-where,

Past milking fields, hedgerows

of hawthorn and ash, spring

Uncoiling into a hint of summer.

 Or perhaps no further than this garden.

The evergreen lawn this portrait depicts

In varying shades of sepia grey -

Slight stain marring the print -

As something vague resolves itself

Into something indelibly real,

Like the familiar becoming loved. 

All that a camera cannot capture:

Sun essaying from behind the clouds,

What words passed between them

As they held their smiling pose,

The footprints left in the deep grass

As they walked toward the house

In cahoots, closer than close.

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