I’m lit by the moon she knew, near yews she planted.
Slop basket on her arm, she drifts towards me on the stepping stones, fingering the sheaves of orchis, mosses, Lockety Goldings draped in light bracelets, as if I might beg the way from her or a halfpenny. I’m at a loss for the courtesies of her century, but her smile glosses them. She lifts a silver strawberry leaf like speculation.
She trusts my arm around the soiled skirts of the lake to her window’s unlit candle. Kneeling beside the sodded wall, we knead roots of lemon thyme into the soil, scribbling with seedlings lines that’ll flower right to my future.
“Sometimes,” she says, “I have to sit. A tightening in my breast. Or sometimes in my throat.”
I know it. And I know its cureless melancholy will pitch her into this same ground. What’s there to say?
Unpicked cherries shine like ideas. If I could take her hand, I would lead her past her circling of the water. Her wren’s eye flicks from the black fells to the lake as if suspecting me, an untimely creature, a fantasy of the memory of her lake.
Words with music 
November 11, 2013 at 12:37 pm
I love the quiet sense of time in this.