As You Trailed Your Hands
That was the landscape we loved best,
the Midlands levels, the river Nene,
the little sandy beaches, the reed-beds,
wires fringed with rain.
From the boat we could see
thin rain falling on the fields,
showers spiking and bubbling in puddles,
japonica in full bloom in the beer-gardens,
flowers the size of hands. ‘I like the rain’,
you said. It was sheeting down,
ghosting the trees, nettle-pollen on the river,
and the river darkening now.
You were trailing your hands in the water
as the boat sliced the waves, dabbling,
your hopes rising and falling,
leaves flying helter-skelter.
Sharers of solitude we were
in our soaking,
sealed off from each other,
guarding something like a flame,--
love’s sudden flare,
the wind surging overhead.
‘What, after all, is a day?’ you said.
On other days – we had picnics,
stripped naked on the bank to bathe,
the air light, the steeple shadowed beneath the waves,
a land of brooks and poplars – gazing at half-mown fields,
a few last strands of cloud, a flash across the dusk
– a dragonfly!
Guessing the wild flowers by the fence.
Six weeks of summer,
hands locked together,
life still as yet unbitten,
joy, or grief, a half-step away
clenched by a dream,
its narrow measure,
the river always flowing.
Page(s) 52-53
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