‘The day begins with endings’: A new book of poetry about topography, time, and shifting identities

Lone Pine

A mountain pine in the plains. How did it come in this
unfrequented alley? How does it
survive so out of place?
It towers gawkily
above the rear of the building.

Walk past it every morning
to touch its toughness. Its needles
are dropping always. They are
the sponginess you tread.
A few are caught in the bark’s
rigid flakes. Gently
prise them out. Release them
to fall where they belong.

They cover dust and flatness
with the scent of resin slopes.

That arrival: a return.
The car with shut windows
had wound through a pine forest.
At last you stood on a ridge
in the blue forgotten air
through which the great trees
were a dry redolence.

It seemed that this was it: belonging.
Home was this.

But the pines kept murmuring
something else. You are
a guest wherever you are:

home is out of place.

Ol’ Man River

The flanks of the brown river
beneath the massed and shadowless clouds
fan out and slide into the shore.

Midstream the water is patchy
but looks immune as armoured cars
to being diverted by myths on the side.

The river is not an old man.
Nor has it ever been the Mother
no matter the evening pieties on show.

It is young blood obeying old commands
to just keep rollin’ along.
It bundles silt towards an ocean.

Tea

He hugs his tumbler of tea.
It is the most precious thing.
He stands beneath a dripping tree
where those...

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