Internal

Wind in tree’s hairlike a lover’s fingerscaressing silver lengthscombing back the year’s detritusundressing each bended curveto leave naked limbsstaring at the scudding heightsof a racing sky.Water ripples under gale’s blastwith a black intensitybobbing duck’s like children’s toysas the last light catchesa burnished sheen reflecting leaves:uprooted oak lies like fallen generaltoddlers pass in hooded anorakscoloured sparks of future glory.…………………………………………………………………………………….Warmth of small palm beneath my own, chasing cackling geese into planned formation, we walk the planted panoply of landscaped park, wind in our teeth, fallen branches, Sunday afternoon walkers with their Labradors and their Sunday lunch indigestion. We are outsiders, nomads you and me, mother alone with child and there is no man to stand between us. Last night’s storm shook the house and you ran to me, huddled in beside the safety that you sought while I lay wild eyed listening to the groans of trees howling ,phantoms rising from their nooks reliving typhoon on China seas the imploding of glass trying to calm myself with a nonchalance I didn’t feel. If this is an Odyssey then there has to be a homecoming maybe this is it, the restoration of a daily peace which only I can achieve in solitude. We’ve talked of patterns, we’ve talked ourselves out of patterns but there is no change, the change only appears in avoidance. Together we rage like two demented bulls until exhausted we smell the blood pool of the other.There is nothing but incomprehension, you are programmed to feel estranged and I am set on a timer for survival. You talk again of death a lilting rise in the panic of your voice, the wind’s wildness in your eyes but it’s not really like that is it? Nothing so precise to seize you in its arms with an absence of internal light then the bite of the long silence heralding nothing.…………………………………………………………………………………………Wind in my hairdancing on skin’s silk,like a lover’s fingers:by the water liesthe moss’d velvetof bare earth’s shoulderby the duck’s bobbingby the toddlers cries.