VISITATION

Strange that you should come

like that, without any form at all,

carrying no symbolic implements,

without smile or frown

or any commotion,

as if you had been there all the time,

like a pair of gloves left in a pocket.

As if I had been looking that way,

into the wide blue yonder, and you were

beside me, enduring my hard luck stories

with infinite patience. Not even waiting –

the tree outside my window

doesn’t wait, nor the ocean-wedge

with its new, precise horizon – just there

like the shadow of a church

or a quiet brother.

And how I saw you, in the mess of things,

was as a slant of grey,

the perfect grey of house dust,

an absolute neutral, with no weaving,

no shimmer of cobalt

and light-years away from Byzantium.

Grey. And I want to add, like light,

as if a skylight opened in my skull,

and into the darkness fall

a diagonal of pure Bodmin Moor.

But even that’s too bright,

too world-we’re-busy-in.

Call it ‘dust’ then, or the bloom

of leaf-smoke from an autumn fire.