Petals everywhere as she watches the Mexican dancing daisies high on the wall. A rose pink blush to them as she sees their artificial counterparts scattered backstage where the new chap confuses Sleeping Beauty and Giselle. He loves me he loves me not with a quartet of prince’s each with a bloom to offer for take or toss. a missive of love. perhaps with memory future in a mirror I arrive beside you holding a fragrant bouquet. Leafing through the pages of a Scottish poetry anthology, it all comes flooding back as I cup a palm to catch the tears.’left the thorn’ beneath a fingertip discs of scarlet

I like the paintings of Paul Cezanne; I like the music of Gabriel Faure; I like all the novels of Jane Austen; I Iike the poems of G M Hopkins;I like the way this prose sounds rhythmic and I don’t like the fact I can’t come up with a title or haiku but maybe I can …tree and I as one my initials carved in the bark another’s hand

No.

The 1984 version is definitive.

mise en bleu
the antediluvian primrose
persists

my
eyes that
would hear silence

are

as hard-wired
for tragedy

as an old Buick
built
on Friday
after
four p.m.

through air
thin
as dimes and dreams

but are due

a touch
of lemon-yellow

moon

birches
bid me

walk on water

icicles
drip

with

anticipation

a hush

on
the other side

of time

The line goes taut.
Face turns from surprise
to exhilaration.
Five years of fishing
has honed the skills,
the give and take,
the shift of weight,
the steady, concentrated,
winding of the reel.
In all that time,
the fish has learned nothing.

Alarm bell resounds –
a deep light enters here,
puts honey in my cheeks –
window garden
shirrs a wedge of sun –
a dream falls over the edge,
lands noiselessly
amid my coming thoughts –
scattered traffic fills
pockets of silence –
it is seven a.m.

One solitary whistle,
in the distance,
late at night,
is enough to
take you places.

who, but I, thinks
of the shattered eardrums of pigeons

exhaustion throttling down to plum blossoms