Primavera

Walk into a room when she’s there
but expecting no one, when the trees
at the broad window finger across the room,
she’s part of it, see, it’s spring
just beginning, sudden as all that,
and dozey and slow
as things are about October.
She sees you and she moves,
makes out she was waiting,
just for this,
realises a smile won’t do, that she has
to say something, that out there
has come inside.
And the look in her eyes,
as if this were something she never expected,
as though picking up a fax that’s about herself
but the print too small to quite make out.
She’s lovely she’s fresh she’s not quite with it.
She’ll do fine.
‘That’s about all I’d want
a poem to say,’ you hear her saying.
Not fussed either way.

page 109

Secular Thoughts

With her hands in frilled white
cuffs and her arms spread
to either side in a dark armchair

she relaxes the entire room,
the city, the morbidities of career
talk, while the fire

leaps on itself, the shaded
lamp brims its chaste corner,
the rims of glasses

floating their thin bangles.
She grows ‘lovelier and lovelier’
while nothing is said,

nor done, nor intended,
nor, mind you, quite out of the question.
Think of fishes and five loaves.