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Jane Routh

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Mid-November Proofs

Sacks of grain in the barn, logs split and stacked,
redwings and fieldfares raiding the hollies and thorn.
Most of the leaves have coloured and gone.
Everything's ready, and still the winter rains and cold
don't come. Only the birches hold fast to bronze halos
waiting their chance to be remarkable.

Every time my oldest friend comes here he says
he can smell this house. Stone? Woodsmoke?
He shrugs: itself; how it always is.
The poet whose proofs I am checking knows
nothing of this. Six hours west and in his bed,
he's unaware of the sheets quietly lifted

and piled page by page into a still life
where low slants of yellow sun lick over
the cut-apples-and-pips patterned lamp
on great-grandfather's table, a postcard from Bora Bora,
an old marriage certificate with a woman's name
crossed out and her sister's written in.

Maybe the poet whose proofs I am reading would like
the way leaves blow in whenever I open the kitchen door.
As I do. Don't ask: everyone knows
when you visit a hermit on the mountain,
he's always just gone, Gathering berries,
his apprentice might say, waving vaguely at the mist.

Page(s) 12

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