The Garden of Sempervirons

We've been in this small room since daybreak.

I look out on America, sunlight on the great plain

of a neighbour's roof, an Ojibwa spirit

racing by. We lie at ease for our own sake.

The frenzy of late March or a Nineties puritan

need for work can't move us from our perch.

You do move your arm, grown a little numb

from the weight of me. We both talk of home

and how we must go back. But for now

we are as numb as a young prisoner in Portlaoise

who hears these words for the first time, amnesty, ceasefire.

At five thousand miles we manage somehow

to find a new vocabulary for peace.

Peace, like light, is almost too much to bear.

After so many years, how to come into the sun,

pull the harrow from the brambles, set to garden.

From this bed where we made love I can see

more than a few winter creatures basking in light.

A College mower goes by, but squirrels hang on.

Late March America is theirs completely;

all ten thousand lakes and a thousand islands.

Our own life has the sandalwood vapour of night,

marked with the fresh touch of your mouth,

love and story, the accent of the South.

Yet what I might have written was suspended

the way yard-work is in a Minnesota winter.

We held our breath. Now, see the winter heads of :

Clematis,

the winter colour of Bergenia, or Skimmia

with it white panticles of fragrance, up-ended.

We see again the private lust of poems and paralysis

of poetry in a time of war; and how, undeterred,