Fox

As I walked past the small field beside Carriage Drive, I had the feeling I was being watched. It’s a feeling I’ve come to trust: If I think I’m being watched, I am. Who, or what, was watching me?

An animal was crouched in the middle of the field. A cat perhaps. No. It was a fox. Very pale in colour, as though it had been sprinkled with silver dust.  Its ears and tail were too big for its body, and yet, as foxes go, this was a large animal.  I gasped with pleasure, and the fox took off across the field – a fox can run at 30 miles an hour – and leapt over the perimeter ditch, its magnificent tail streaming behind it like a comet.

I stood at the field end.

Deeper in was a fox.

Suddenly I felt myself feared.

It was not a good feeling.

Echo

Echo

The air still, but elastic,

Throwing back

The quick dactyls

Of a dog-bark

Poem - Arthritis

Arthritis

My bones are without sap.

The pain strips me of all leaf.

I must make the pain beautiful,

like an old Caledonian pine,

twisted by years of wind and rain,

and now misshapen, but still tree.

Tree, I am tree.

I must remember that. 

A gap of three months

Three months without posting. That means I've been in pain for three months. It's been a bad year. It's not often I can't cope, but this year I haven't coped.  And meanwhile, the landscape has gone on without me. As it should.