Through the large window at the end of the room

I can see, out in the April garden,

a sudden wind broadcasting the blossom,

from next door’s ancient pear tree, like snow flakes.

A female blackbird is collecting bedding

and struts of twigs and grass, and airlifting

them into the ivy that covers the fence.

On the CD player, between melody

and chords, a dead guitarist’s fingers

slide so poignantly across the strings and frets.

A black and white lithograph, fifty eighth

in a series of a hundred entitled

‘Berezy’, ‘Birches’, bought in Moscow’s

Izmailovsky Market – the May Putin

was first crowned – from the artist’s son, the father

fallen, like most of Russia on hard times, shows,

through a thicket, a tangle of leafless

birch trees, a stretch of water gleaming: beyond,

a low rise with a pale fence and a wooden

dacha small against an alabaster sky.

I write a couplet, in my head, that is

of such Arcadian perfection, of such

bucolic beauty, it stutters into

silence, like the light of fireflies in a jar.