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Derrick Buttress

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Alien

You were silent today,
watching through the glass
as I paced the yard under the sycamore
where dry seeds lift into the wind
and scratch the silence of the afternoon.
Such long intervals between the words,
between the yes and no of our lives.

I must learn to be neat and brutal
as the yard I walk in.
I must learn to think of nothing,
to think of seeds, only,
lifting into the wind of cold afternoons,
learning the shape of the yard
that shapes me as you watch
from the room where you breathe
the scent of our lives.

Each day the yard blooms
then dies at evening.
Something must be saved -
the seeds, the name that claims them,
you and your unreflecting eye
within the unbreathed vowel.

When I glance at you behind the glass
you turn away into perfect silence.
The seeds on the palm of my hand
know such repose, speak such words

as would span the heart’s lacuna.
Perfect seeds on the palm of my hand
and you behind the glass.
It will always be this way.

 

Derrick Buttress has had plays on television and Radio 4. He won joint 1st prize in the Cannon Poetry Millennium Competition and has published two pamphlets of poetry.

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