FALLOWFIELD

(This poem was written after a visit to pick up my daughter from her student house in Manchester - in the area of Fallowfield. The house had been refurbished for students but the back garden, which was the size of a small allotment, had been left alone. On the Sunday morning I walked about it with a mug of coffee and got to thinking about the old couple who had lived in it before developers bought it. Their love for and understanding of the garden was clear and it was quite sad that it had now become a fallow field. This poem was published in Borderlines, the journal of the Anglo-Welsh poetry society - complete with the inevitable printing error. Andrew Motion liked this one too!)

The archeology of the garden is what remains for us
To construe; we are the unexpected historians
Of your seasons.
Here are the crenellated plant pots,
Fish mouths pouting, waiting for the tamp of compost,
The exploratory squirm of root.
Packets of seeds stacked and shelved,
Half gone to past crop, rattle to me
A shaman’s dry promise of fecundity.
A broken grin of white tags scattered on the
Workbench, tallies in patient copperplate
Each row of seedlings, teased from tray to bed;
Place cards at the table of your plenty.
What I see and lift to sniff and shake,
bear your traces still;
Now these broken frames, overgrown beds,
Cloches discarded like creels in an abandoned harbour,
Must speak of your transformations in this garden alembic.

Sitting here in your shed,
Sunday coffee steaming in my hand, I think of
An old man of my village, widowed and wry,
Each day in the growing season he passed
My window in a slow progress to his lot
To coax life royally from dry seed, corm and bean.
This plod I saw as agricultural, ancient,
Calibrated back beyond slow motion;
A sleepwalking movement of earth warming and cooling,
Of infinite patience in the gain and loss of light.

Looking up I see a hieroglyph of nail heads
Driven into a cross beam;
Hanging places for the hoe, spade and rake
You stooped in here
To hone against the cling of soil, the bind of weed;
A lost script with no stone to reveal its message.