river 2012 - 12

Absence

When the morning doesn't fit, when I seem to be missing the lid of the jigsaw box that holds the pieces of my day, I leave the house and walk through the orchard to the row of leylandii and look at the depressions in the dusty ground beneath them where I'm sure the wild pheasants nestle during the day, even though I only know them from claw marks left in the dusty earth, that my hand never finds a trace of warmth in the shallow bowls, not even a feather.

Some days I catch a glimpse of them – the males barred bright gold and brown, their red wattles, the mottled females – skittering between the rows of apple trees, always keeping a distance. How could they trust us after all this time?

I startled them once, in the farmyard when I opened the back door, a dozen or more of them taking flight at the sound then sight of me: the whirr of wings loud enough to make me step back suddenly, alarm mixed with delight, flashes of green and purple returning to me at moments for the rest of that day, like a charge to the heart.

river 2012 - 11

Do christmas cards count as cardboard or as paper recycling? Should they be in the green box, with the cans, or in the green bin with the cardboard packaging? It is sunrise. Through the winter trees the village looks like it could be on fire and the rest of us are watching in the dark. I decide on the green box. Part of me thinks, 'what does it matter?' while another part wants to get it right, this little thing that feeds into the bigger picture, the world beyond my life in this house where I feel safe.

river 2012 - 10

37 years ago I cried when my sister got married and left home. For fifteen years she'd slept on the other side of the room from me. We'd hit each other with hangers and hairbrushes. I'd hidden behind the door of our bedroom to jump out and frighten her when she wandered back from the bathroom at night. She called me 'child' to annoy me. And now she was leaving and becoming a wife. In wedding speeches the fathers of the bride and groom talk about gaining a son, a daughter. But all I knew was that I was losing my sister.

mobile blackspot
I sing happy birthday to my sister
in the middle of a farmyard

river 2012 - 9

Not a leaf remains on the apple trees in the orchard. We have used the last of the cherry wood on the fire. Last night we watched a movie about a man who could travel through time. Already the days are getting longer. The new year is pretty much like the old year when I remember to notice it. Today I feel lucky.

river 2012 - 8

new bookshelves
the poetry my cat finds
in an empty box

river 2012 - 7

Dream date

It's not going to work between me and Gerard Butler despite the way he hugs me, rocks me with his enthusiasm, his smile. Even though he turns away his ex-girlfriend who turns up in a gold lamé negligee. Even though he has a male assistant called Mitzi with a bald head.

He has four dogs. He feeds them on broken biscuits and crackers. His house is a warren of tunnels and secret doors. And the forest fire is getting closer, flames wrapping the hillside, running down towards the edge of the lake, which may save us, or may not. His father was Spanish, he says quietly as we leave the house with only a picnic basket.

new year

a dead conifer leans

across the lane

river 2012 - 6

after the storm
a squeeze of sunlight
through the bare trees
I salute a magpie

river 2012 - 5

all night high winds,
the slap of rain, flower pots
rolling along the drive, a spruce
brought down in the orchard -

we believe we are safe
behind brick and glass, under tiles,
but in a small corner of our minds
we imagine the roof lifting, the wind 

scattering the patterns of  our lives
across the Downs, practicing, maybe,
for a time when we'll have to let go.

river 2012 - 4

first week in january
happy with the woodpile's
weight loss

river 2012 - 3

The people we sold the house too have lifted off the plaster on the far wall of the first floor and uncovered a section of a painted medieval wall beneath. I always knew it was there and don’t know why we didn’t do the same. But I am pleased to see it exposed now, the past rising into the present, keeping us company.

The dream is easy to interpret: I have a book to write about my hometown in South Wales. The photographs I take are the top layers of stories: at home I lift off each skin and slip deeper into other people’s lives. But I am slipping deeper into myself too: things half remembered, roads not taken.

so many questions
the wind whistles
in the wooden eaves

river 2012 - 2

last day of the holiday
the glass monkey
slips off the tree

time to hide
the unopened chocolates

river 2012 - 1

new year
heat from the embers
of last year's fire