I’ve been asked to write
m i n d f u l l y
I just want to get to the river and swim
This short walk’s made so much longer
by all our stopping and noticing
I notice the weak Devon sun
struggling to be noticed
above the air extractor
proud in its noise
against all this bloody silence

Pine needles flirt with cobbles
like a bunch of girls from Margate
I flip flop as hard as I can
to break into the quiet

Where are the birds?
I realise I haven’t looked up before

Christ, how many joggers are there?
Thin white women with dreads
You can tell we’re somewhere posh

Hooray for the end of the car park
All these so-called environmentalists
with their neat rows of cars
showing off their green stickers
as if these make any difference

I walk by a hedgerow, a smile of sunflowers
heads down, slightly hungover
like me

A seed floats past my shorts
as if seeking to impregnate
the wrong species

Purple briars reach out their barbs
in mock welcome

Look, I’ve really tried
but now I just want to get in the fucking river

I think about pike
can’t help it; bloody Ted Hughes
gets everywhere

In the darkening, someone waves
a white hankie
surrendering to the night
I’m told this attracts the birds
represents the underside of a wing

Granite gives off a glow
giving up its power

I won’t say this out loud
into the moor
its many ears of bracken and heather
but position my head one way
the other – as if I’ve antennae

am reminded of a singer
who said she’d choose hearing
over sight – I thought she was wrong
Her sense triumphs

At the furthest edges of bracken
At the fclick-whirr
At the fa burbling
At the fa gentle electronica

Nightjars
pushed to the edge of the land
The moor pulses to a faint techno

Former mines glower against purple
All that’s left of the sun
at the join with the sea –
its hinge
its cold wing

On the strand – a thin bar of ground-
up granite – between St Agnes & Gugh

both islands, yet at low tide
they remain stubbornly umbilical

Wind nibbles at the bar but the tide’s feeble
I encourage it, draw a channel with my toe

9 or 10 paces to the other sea, wanting to coax
– not force – the sea into making full-on islands

A serpent of water snakes into the toe trail
before being drunk by some god beneath the sand

More snakes & worms inch along, they too are drained
but the sea’s inquisitive. I dig deeper with my heel

a red sliver of seaweed swims the new channel –
at speed. I dig again, this time with a pointy boulder

I can just about wield. A spume of sea, seductive
almost shy, feels its way, as if sightless. I’ve done nothing

like this since I was a child. I glee rises up as the seas
meet. I’ve made two proper islands. Their meeting’s casual –

no fizz or chemical reaction – just two siblings getting along
My enjoyment ebbs. Why had I felt the need to control?

Did I imagine I was some latter-day Canute?
The channel’s become a rivulet, a small stream of guilt

The sea now has a memory – having breached the sands
at low tide in only September. What will come

of a spring tide, or storm? The two houses of Gugh
stare at me; their gable ends a judgement

the leaves tussle
in on themselves,
as if hoping to return
to their tree –

the tree which rejected them
threw the branch down

the shaggy emerald mass
lay there, a queer bouquet
glossing
against the field’s dark corduroy

the leaves hate this brown jug
where I thought they’d be happy
I gave them plentiful water
they’re stood on a wooden shelf
with a window to consider

they refuse to look up or out
will break rather than unfurl
so much to admire
in their untameable knowledge
of the self

I can’t picture any of their faces,
I can’t pbut I can still hear the old peoples’ cards
and poor choiceslapping the table around our storm lamp,

all the laughing and stories, clank
I can’t pof pony bottles on linoleum,
and poor choicegood-natured resurrection of screw ups

and poor choices, enough to keep them all
I can’t phumble, enough to guarantee
and poor choicefaith that a heart laid down in the dark

was a heart, and not some diamond
I can’t pthrown down to steal a loose trick
and poor choiceor trump card played out of turn
was a heart, and not soto beat whatever wind was on the way.

The mo—after Frank Relle’s photograph,
The moRelle Gallery, NOLA 2025

The moon hugs the horizon
The moin this shot, and the water’s
The moon hugslow enough for two feet of cypress roots

to sit above this lake’s surface. These trees
The mostand straight, in a pack like
The moon hugsguardians. Of night, of the sinking

light along the horizon, of whatever
The mosecrets that hide on the other side.
The moon hugsGreen needles, moss, shine of bright

beam along the ground—so much
The motexture in this space, so many signs
The moon hugsthings change here. Leaves fall.

Tides rise. The suns climbs and
The mofalls. These trees, though. These trees
The moon hugscan’t leave the frame. Won’t. Witness, or no.

Now, I watch you cut roses by the fruit trees when the
day is limonada cool and smooth. On Telfair we get full sun.

The birds do not sing keep sweet, be good;
They only watch us plant our seeds &
shed their feathers like blessings.

We trench out rows for zinnias, cosmos,
mauve-ish echinacea; the soil turns
& my tether unbraids itself slower, & less.
Just like this, beautiful begins to mean more
than it did.

Do you see the way time & un-time become ripe on the mulberry tree?
& the way our sunflowers grow friendly, fully sure of each other?
Have you thought how the orange cat at the back door
who owns so many names
has known us,
& our home,
& the smell of our hands?

This is what our first spring will always be:
cuttings from the garden like babies brought
home from a hospital. Dried petals strewn
Across the kitchen stove. Flowers on flowers,
marveled at & memorialized
over & over & again.

dead, belly dreaming of warm
offal cracked from the cage
of a small bird, the wet pop
of foraged berries.

Weakness bears its own weight
anchoring the feather-skeleton
of fox, slowing the easy stride
once light of heart as a man
with coins jingling in his
pockets.

Streetlight drags shadows long
and fox soft-shoes under moon
that shatters its fat penny
on the oily marsh, haunting
tree hollow and root. Fox

tours Efford’s derelict fort
prodding earthworks cut-rock
scarp, wind screaming through
the sally-port, squint in the uplift
of leaves, grit –

of leaves, grit – slipsslfox
slips into your every step,
blunt-pads nightly
outings, always the hunt –
for food,
a mate,
you.

dead. In another universe, the car
carried on down the unlit lane
and the bumper’s punch
felt like a glance. You
run and run and run and run.

In this life,
you fall to a patch of grass
where I find you as I
traipse the mowed field
into wood’s scribble,

marbled sky shouldering
its sombre weight back
to where field meets lane.

I spy you among buttercups
lying on grass as if basking.

That night
the dream of you
lingers.