Now I am not I,
Nor is my house now my house
‘Romance Sonambulo’, Garcia Lorca
He was sitting at a window
Watching the hour resolve itself
From the night’s black scrawl
To a muted green of dawn,
Listening
To the house
Coming back to life
In the morning’s pale cold.
The morning greeting him
With a stilled garden
Caught in the lure
Of autumn’s chill air.
Overnight, rain fell like lead,
Silvering the thatched lawn.
The beech hedge threaded
and interwoven by roiling coils
Of bramble. In the beds,
Apologetic poppies
Shaking sorry bonnets.
In the earth, worms ooze.
His eyes lit upon an apple tree
Planted by an unknown hand
Barely capable of bearing fruit
Its branches chafe
As if for warmth, like two hands
Over a hearth. Its neighbour
With one or two still clinging on:
Rotting baubles pecked by rooks,
Carcasses littering the grass,
Eviscerated carrion
And turning brown,
Left to spoil and seed.
He was sitting at a window
Looking upon a world
That was not his to know
A world being reformed
By the sun’s steady hand.
A garden which was like
A room of the mind
In a house returned to life.