Charles Hadfield
A Gradual Process
Stop. You don’t know the half of it yet:
the music’s still playing on the wind-up gramophone
and through the windows giving onto midsummer
you can hear pheasants bark, doves coo,
the distant wisps of cloud almost singing to themselves too
in the clarity of this perfect evening.
Hut. Always a but? Does there have to be?
Not this time, no I won’t write but, maybe then.
So maybe. Maybe a cat licks its paws in the shade,
uncurls, looks puzzled, settles again, &c.
Not much to go on then: a clink of cutlery, drift of unseen
voices from beyond the view? And distant children playing
a long summer game? All these, and the scent of night stock
now echoes faintly on the breeze, no need
for perfumes or other devices… enough
just for you to smile again.
Enough that the patterns repeat, continue,
the motif swirling and complex but a basic
common sense underlying it all.
We are here to be forgiven and to trust others
to make their own mistakes in their own way.
And now the ragged mindlight. Hard to remember
heat dazzle when these ripped grey tatters of cloud
flap across a dark sky but later it comes back:
vertical squashed shade, slats of blinds, bumping
of flies against glass high up near the ceiling.
And things are taking much longer to heal now.
Page(s) 112-113
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