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Carolyn Fisher

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Candlelit Dinner for Two

The touch-paper of spring
lights the garden, wattle blossom strikes
a match with a patch of daffodils
like a great green table of candles
the morning I leave. Buds on a magnolia
tree split into a gentle grin, beaks emerge,
a bouquet of crumpled wing
pressed into flight by the warmer nights
so that when I get back –
and the season has really taken off –
a flock of exotic white birds
will be waiting on the bare branches.

Thirty hours and thirty thousand
miles later, early spring dresses
down into late summer. Time and space
have no manners: shuffle faces like a pack
of cards, laughing in mine to throw
a double six of years; I think I glimpse
the wrong friend in the wrong place
and don’t recognise my peers.

But this evening I am treated
to the view I grew up with: hedgerows
mete out fields as softly as the spoken vowels,
hangers share secrets like lovers.
And I’m down on my knees
studying the difference in the small change
of scattered flowers when I’m startled.
Like the sudden show of a waiter
and as familiar as the taste of nostalgia
it brings, in the dumpsy dark
of a Somerset path, I know the white plate
of a barn owl’s face and the silent
unfolding napkin of wings.

 

dumpsy, a Somerset word for dusk

Page(s) 36

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