Oft Have I Travelled

Evening light hits the garden like a paint bomb,
drenches the rusty gooseberry patch and the loganberries,
drowns the tumbledown flowers and the compost heap
with its surround of corroded metal grates
glowing orange — explodes, and throws its shrapnel
straight at my eyes. So it’s no wonder — you see —
that I can’t see. It makes me a Midas,
my green-fingered fingers golden in the dirt,
where everything I touch becomes — well —
Focus, on something little. This flower, borage.
This one’s really borage, the others aren’t.
Their furry leaves will prick you if they can
and their flowers, though pretty, are small.
A clump of languid fading violet poppies
stand nervously and elegantly apart.
There’s a garden pond, in reality an old bath
with algae and rusty tidemark, sunk in earth,
the plastic whiteness of its curling lip
undisguised by bits of broken rock
and several garden-centre animal figures
that pin it to the landscape where it sits.
I AM, I tell myself. I am. This crazy spring
opens out now into this garden, where
the paint bomb day after day explodes. My question
Who?holds also What? and Where? and How? We only
live in three dimensions at a time.
Three dimensions! Three months of sweats and virus
trapped in a flat as dark and triangular
as one of those glass prisms we were once given,
but shut inside a box where no colours happen.
Or maybe that was just inside my head.
Week after week I leaned like an old drawing
out the little window, out of perspective
like everything. Steeply pitched, like everything —
the rooftops opposite with their red clay tiles
have jostled at different angles for so long
the roofers who laid them wore herbs against the plague,
and swore at their work in the filthiest Middle English.
Roof-peaks and chimneys rise like Jerusalem artichoke.
They remain untroubled by events
which happen and recede, several per century.
Red those tiles and red the brick of the road,
and where two rooftops meet there’s a gutter,
and where it’s bent at the join, the sparrows play.
I’ve been digging out a vegetable patch
and every time I stop to catch my breath
— recalibrate the little stabbing pains —
a scruffy-feathered restless robin hops
along the handle of my garden fork,
tame as a budgie, and casually eats
the woodlice I’ve decanted from their homes.
I sit and watch him. Then we watch each other.

This shed’s my shotgun shack — though it came to me
legally, I swear — and you said the same.
Like the ones in N’Orleans. And also the ones
covered with honeysuckle, which we sucked
as kids, to drink the honey. I sit in front
on the weathered wooden box I call my porch
like an outlaw resting on his pile of coins.
The robin hops around like an overseer
wherever he wants to go, and tests the goods,
while the seagulls on a roof outside the garden
watch the sky. I watch from my wooden box
— earthbound, but getting better — and swig cold tea.
They fly, you’ll soon fly there, free, and filled
with all the Kentish gold you could absorb
in these few months, and I’ll stay here. I sit
beneath the corrugated plastic eaves
and look at Mrs Blackbird and the robin.
This is going to be my adventure,
and the blinding garden is my asylum,
and the bit of me that breaks off and leaves
breaks off and leaves.

(You can hear me reading this poem on the podcast The Thunder Mutters, episode 8, at 0:26:48. Run by Adam Horovitz and Becky Dellow, the podcast focuses mainly on the poetry and music of the Romantic poet John Clare.)