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.