Samara

As your mouth savours the word, tasting

for roots and connotations, they wind down

around us like worn clockwork toys; or spent moths

losing the power of flight, tail-spinning out of control.

Midges in the afternoon dark play out

their doddery cat's-cradle; and shambling home,

turning over old leaves, I imagine

a musty office at the terminal

where all our lost days come to rest: indexed

in boxes with dropped keys, bereaved

gloves, watches whose hands have seized

into place; unreclaimed belongings...

A lagged carousel in another time-zone

where our baggage shunts unendingly round.

What she envisaged as a vase taking shape

on the evenly-revolving wheel of their days,

an ornament formed by their four

hands' dutiful moulding, he viewed more

as an elaborate code time and diligence

were bound to unlock, an encrypted grammar

of erotic potential to decipher.

So when, in that hotel in Florence,

after several tumultuous synchronised-

comes, he was moved to murmur My love

we've cracked it- and they collapsed back

listening to the clatter of pigeons

fanning-out across the piazza, like a deck

of cards being shuffled - it was then he realised

his words veered in three directions:

were vase, code - or their future - still intact?

                      I

Working to the deadline

    of his body's waning duration

he paints on, despite the stubble of ice

    his greatcoat has grown, maculae

of snow that may well be his eyesight

    failing. If nothing else, let him complete

this landscape. He sits by the river

    beside the last, stubborn angler

struggling to hold captive

    a moment already gone, a play of bleak light

over water: grey-brown turbid on-surge,

    scant poplars like besoms, cigar-coloured

reeds and drooped stems. Let him complete

    this last winter landscape;

it replicates some region of himself.

                   II

    Eminence grise of this depleted river

the crook'd heron, catching no roach,

    heaves herself skywards barely

splashing. Across February's stark

    diagram, dots of colour punctuate:

plodding to his vantage-point

     he spies aconite at the wayside,

nibs of green on hawthorn-twigs.

    He squints, trying to focus Art's

eroded lens; he wills the poplars

   not to come into leaf. But squats on,

staring: he can't paint round what's there.

                   III

How is it, next day, the men with ladders

    arrive, the tree-surgeons

in council uniforms? Theirs is a kind of art, too,

    this shearing and clipping

of incipient leaves; a kind of editing,

    or purging. They bend to their labour

bemused yet unquestioning: orders

   direct from the mayor. (And isn't the mayor

the Master's patron? Is it true

    the landscape, on completion,

is promised to his collection?)

                    IV

A day's grace before the leaves inch back;

    spring keeps seeping through.

But one good morning is all he needs, now

   the mornings remaining are so few:

to grasp back the origin, that speckled moment

    the landscape seized him

and he set out towards it, committed

     the first mark - as everywhere snowflakes,

like so many blisters,

     fell healing back into earth.

I see now

nothing's itself: the trees

are only age-old folios

abandoned on lecterns

when the mob

overran the city.

They come adrift

now, outgrow their own

knowledge, riffle-read

by the drizzly breeze,

fragmenting flake

by flake

until in time

they'll lay bare

their inner cartographies

of loss,

limbs upstretched

to beg

for absolution,

like quattrocento

saints;

then finally flayed

to bone-structures

fossilised

against the dense

chalk sky.

So time spirals

backwards, books

into trees, agile sparrows

into eggs

airports

into the wanderlust

that spawned them

and all our sleek

devices and monuments

to permanence

into metaphors,

guess-work,

                dreams

Metaphormosis

In an archive of parched leaves, the cloud-bordered brindle unfolds her two-page mappamundi, limned on vellum sunlight or touch would crumble -

Harcross Bridge: that seems, in this light, a wooden horse stooping down to drink, outstaring its reflection, as the mane of leaning men (spitting, flicking ash) baulk at theirs -

Never at rest, never swaying as such, the poplars perform their t'ai-chi -

Railings painted so hastily, the black municipal gloss entombs hawthorn-leaves, woodlice, a human hair -

The leather boxing-gloves abandoned on the footpath resolve back into horse-droppings as you near -

In-and-out of umbrella brought wet indoors: that's how the take-off of carrion-crows strikes you -

Her lace undies swishing in the sink, one lingual away from becoming undines

Twin-kittens play-tussle in a fluent, yin-and-yang ball -

Wind, hatching the butterfly-painting from the nursery-table - its gaudy symmetry still runny - launching it: fluttering, faltering, fluttering -