Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge

a continuing way of life … in which stray objects, stones, glass, pictures, sculpture are arranged in light and in space



It’s like coming home
after all these years,

to a lightness
almost forgotten,

this reverence for things
crafted or found – a huddle

of stones, for instance,
with shoulders hunched

against the wind,
or a seedhead horned

like a tribal mask –
things gracefully

co-existing, this Miró
by the door no more solid,

it seems to say,
than the browned umbel

of an allium, a painted
wildflower no lovelier

than light reflected
off a piano stool,

things separate, simple,
and connected, as the lines

of a seashell echo
the grain of scrubbed deal,

its curve the perimeter
of the table top.





Silver Washed Fritillaries



You were right: it was never
just about butterflies – your fritillaries,
for instance, that were less washed
with silver than this landscape. Yes,
it was about you, my shy, awkward,
complex father, a way of connecting.
And it’s about being your eyes now
and reporting back (as if such a thing
were possible), making a mental note
of the first white violets piercing
winter debris, or this sea of grasses
flowing towards a hill that’s been singled out
for special attention by the light,
and how the silver wash takes us
circling back to those afternoons
watching for your butterfly in Neroche.
You told me just before you died
you thought something carried on,
though you wouldn’t commit yourself
to words like God or Heaven,
and after all these were your church
and your religion, the woods and fields,
all the intricacies of butterflies and plants
you trusted as evidence of purpose
and design. But isn’t this the only way
you live on, in these flimsy connections
between butterflies and light, between sky
and grasses and a name? Then why
does it feel wrong to have poured you
into the hard ground rather than let you fly
free of earth, weight and limitations,
scattering your atoms over the wide hills
or in some opening in the woods
where fritillaries settle on bramble flowers,
lifting wings not feebly washed
but jagged with bolts of silver lightning?