From 'Allotments' by Michael Murphy

Enclosures Act


A knot of music the ear unravels
this landscape is assembling
even as you listen: hills, a river,
a single-minded vowel.

*

Like eyes beneath a wide-brimmed hat
the blackbird on the gate-post
looks you through. It reads your mind.
You might as well not be here.

*

Barbed wire cuts across the path,
bringing you up short
against the limits of geography
and maps. Not here but somewhere.

*

Sky and river. Restless dusk.
Then dawn. An unbleached-linen shroud.


***


It is a notational poem. Here's a thing and there's a thing. And all these things hang like a not quite spoken word, one on the edge of being spoken. Absence and absences. That shroud, that restless dusk. It is as if the world were without you.

I think it is quite beautiful.


Picture of Michael from here


***

Tomorrow to Warwick University for the Stratford-upon-Avon Poetry Festival, with C, and two outstanding student poets, Ágnes Lehoczky and Meghan Purvis. Zoë Brigley is bringing young poets as is Luke Kennard. David Morley will provide his own. Their reading is at 6pm. Zoë, Luke and I at 7.30.