It’s been like this for six months, or maybe a month.
Less than drizzle, more than a shower.
Consistent at least. Sitting at the window,
on a new estate, behind thin curtains,
looking out over a running street.
Watching it come down, ceaseless, endless,
morning to night. A chance to stay in,
warm, snug, cosseted, believing .
Weather eye on the world, three streets down.
Safe from the terror, of the old life.
A chance book, tea, gas fire, fifty p in the meter.
Avoiding learning, spend a day in a couple of hours.
Sometimes though, lethargy overcomes, overwhelms,
to the point where you have to move.
Big boots, jumpers, waterproofs, of a sort.
Drive out to the moors, park up.
A randomised route, to a gutty slog,
through running, ruining, mud.
Soaked from the knees down,
damp from the neck down.
Blown to bits, laughting at the exposure.
Revelling in the there, then.
To reach an underwhelming tor,
damp granite, no view.
Scratch around for a box, then to turn around.
Sometimes organised, a flask of tea at the car.
Turn in against the wind, and wind the window down.
An alternative view, of the same state of play.
Back out even, a glutton for meaning,
hoping for something.
But nothing more than this.
Other times,a book of poems,
parked on the Hoe, pretentious, pretending.
Looking out to sea, lost in the mizzle.
Wipers blatter, the car a heated fug.
She was there one day.
Back to the house, there, the warm girl,
with needs.
Made it all seem so perfect.
These were the times for me,
this was awakening. So entrenched, embedded,
so much a part of me.
That even now, on the other side of the world,
thirty years away.
Outside the office window,
of a sallow Sunday shift.
A thin drizzle against the pane,
can take me back there in an instant.
“But the point of this story, it is has a point, and the culmination of the whole incident and the thing that has made it stay in my memory when so much else has faded, was climbing into that top corner of the three-tier bunkhouse, close under the sloping dry timbers of the roof, to be cradled in the total luxury of dry blankets, and to hear the rain furiously pattering and hissing on the slates a few inches above me. I was at one with all animals, in all dens, all over the world.”
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