(no subject)

[apiphile]

hillier's remnants

my late grandfather kept several greenhouses
being not so much a keen gardener
as a man obsessively addicted to the nurture of plants
the identification of plants
the cataloguing of plants
and the photographing of plants
nor was he content to extend nonjudgmental affection
to every growing thing;
his ire for dandelions and dogs
knew no bounds; he'd have happily taken
an air rifle to a cat were it allowed.

in all my fondest memories the light is low,
the rosy air of early summer sunsets
just topping a high hedge of cyprus trees
to kiss the six different varieties of apples
just beginning to blossom;
the world smells of potting compost
and broken terracotta,
with tiny green seedlings scrabbling
for the sun beneath their window-pane homes
and the rough flint gravel crunches
like the teeth of giants
and there is a thrush yelling out
a territorial boundary
and my grandfather
has just called someone
a bugger.

in later years the garden house smelt of mould
and the carpets set my teeth on edge;
i was relegated to lonely darkness
when the whole family gathered to celebrate
some forgotten christianity or other.
i buried myself in books
and the town shrank until there was only
silence and decay,
cat shit in the paved alleyway
and a mumbling, repeated lecture
about the same slides we had all seen before -
the universe was filled with rain
and possibilities disappeared
as each mysterious painted door in a garden wall
was resolved into leading
only to places i couldn't go.

though the light will never look that way again
and even the vastest english gardens
are tiny in their familiarity
some things remain constant;
now that the cats are safe from curses
i have no one to ask for classification
of every sprout and shrub
it must be enough to have a memory
and to know that whatever else i may be
i am stalwartly and steadfastly
a bugger.

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