| Captain's Landfall After lurching
ships and forty years of winter storms
did for his hip,
he made his landfall,
put both anchors down
at haven in the thrift
and left horizons empty of himself
to stare at vapour trails
and stars, that seemed to trade through space.
Hove to above the cliff,
safe in his anchor garden
he kept his cabin neat as a cat
until the old North Easter
claimed him back,
piped him aboard a January night.
Spring found his gleeful garden going on,
inhabited by plants he hadn't authorised,
liberated couch grass tied his anchors' flukes
to bleed their iron oxide in the ground
weed tangled, stranded
their long landhunger satisfied.
Sundays
I walk on Sunday by the criss crossed tracks,
rusty lines, the disused cranes
and in the sidings,
hawthorn blossom's
plastered by a palette knife
and Queen Anne's lace is on the bank
where cowslips died at onset of the Spring.
Cans of brown ale beside the broken shed
Have bled a residue
among the cardboard and the shattered glass and needles
where
someone looked for , maybe found, a sort of ecstasy
among the moonflowers
where the branch line in the cutting leads to
nowhere.
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