35 Clicks
Is there a time when it happens?
You know – the major thing
The neon letters that say
Here – purpose – pathway –
This is the way to get home?
Driving southward, 35 clicks to front door.
At the round of a bend I make my usual nod
To the sea and the hill that show we’re close:
A heart-slow, breath-ease
A tiny gratitude felt in muscles held tense.
I brought my loved ones here
Thinking of a place to call reprieve:
A garden to tend, a space to expand in.
Not for the first, I’ve chosen distance, restless for change,
But this pausing place has become our heart home.
We live here in a way that we haven’t.
Will I now see the garden
Daily as it grows – ferns for the shade, lemons for the sun?
Not at intervals grasped between absences
But in the light when I wake, under stars before I sleep?
I miss little except the tram rumble under my head
Application of brakes, bell-ding and onward movement.
Loved because it echoed the Northern Line’s
Deep baffled movements far below my family’s house
Soothing a child to sleep, in another city long ago.
Now, I hear young paws on a verandah beyond the blinds,
Joyful rediscovery of bits of earthy bone, enriched by burial;
Deep green of a lady palm settled into soil, rooting down;
Soft patting of a clock marking passage, somewhere near.
A bowl of ocean pebbles scavenged over years:
One oval stone, mottled the colour of winter sky,
Another, water-smoothed all over except a single, tiny groove.
A pale, skinny specimen that I’ve kept, even so.
Kitchen table worn down from many moves, well past presentable:
Scuffs of knives and forks, cup-marks circling on striated wood.
All I know, I loved this new place from our first meeting.
We made it ours because it felt that way;
A calmness, gentle with morning mists, slow to rise,
Every corner gifting a viewpoint on distant green, grey, treetops,
Walking, last night’s rain under foot, eking into soil, path and timber.
No rumbling under my head – no momentum to build
No city, no outward motion, no neon, no need.
Earlier purposes drifted from the surface into depths I can’t see
Gate drawn to a close, I’ve slept a month and brewed a cup on waking.
Is this the time when it happens?
I sit, a hiatus on a bench – my eyes resting on the small world in my view –
And hold myself from wishing different.
