The Jar
Flush with the ground now, the gate I pulled behind me, Saturdays,
my bouquet of rhubarb tied high with baling twine, bars even light.
The low branch of the crab apple tree yields an habitual shrug.
I bend to unpick a rust petal from my skirt and notice it, as I would
any yellow flower that had survived my step. It is, instead, what
would have been just unremarkable: buff ceramic, glazed; homely;
sunk to the neck in earth that falls, when I tip it over, on boots
I polished south of yesterday. For butter maybe. Or preserves.
The sound of soil on leather is like spit on a warming iron,
like the sputter of two pheasants shook out of mountain ash.
Tomorrow, in another place, I will rub what’s left of home
between foreign fingers, unpick the primrose I pressed
in my notebook and leave in photographs to be developed.
Perhaps then, these things will be simpler: the kitchen garden
buried in its own soil; tyre tracks pointing every which way
beyond a path where no footfall has been ripening for years;
a brace of decades; flecks under the rim, what little remains.
Page(s) 20
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