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sentient

THE BELVEDERE

You and I with fifty valentines and

February’s sun pale on the glass!

We count the camellia’s crimson blooms –

and remember, last summer, our grandchild

shivering with ecstasy the day

she chased her daddy with the garden hose.

From here, the house seems sentient, our

remembrancer – the lawns and borders and

parts of neighbours’ houses an urban landscape.

In this wooden hexagon – a half-glazed

gazebo, its blind back turned to a high

Victorian wall festooned with ivy

and clematis – voices are naturally

intimate and revealing, privacy

in an open space. Is it remarkable

we have been friends and lovers so long?

Chance, choice, serendipity or willpower?

We opt for all four. Behind us, in shade

for most of a winter’s day, accidental

primroses are blooming.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INTIMATIONS

Embrasure, Spinalonga © SCES 2003



This house is sentient, light with rapture,

replete with canny, familiar ghosts.


This house has been indifferent

to vicissitudes of human fortune:

train wreck and famine, siege and tsunami.


The grounds have diminished. From the residue,

you have made an L-shaped paradise:

rhododendron, camellia, nasturtium,

eucalyptus – a global gazetteer.


On some summer nights, the pomaded air

heavy still with heat, there is a moment,

ecstatic, brief, when we will live forever.