saturday sun/ saturday snow
saturday snow
magnolia all flopsy
browning over
petal strew over the path
I have to tread on them.
I ate a kind of spiralling pasta
with just pureed roast cauli
for dinner last night, by the light of two candles.
for lunch, sweet potato softened to nothing
(cooked on wednesday?)
softened to not object to even the nudging of the back of a spoon
I rub the toast against yesterday’s roasting dish, for its oil,
and smooth the orange flesh over.
It is eaten in a cold sunlit moment outside,
honey on toast at eleven,
this lunch at more like four.
snow, then hail, by six.
I plant some lavender beneath a window,
dig a hole for it with a trowel and pick out two fat worms. They are smooth, their bodies sibilant, when I first notice them. Once I’ve touched them they tease, like burnt hair.
I must frazzle them: maybe it is the oil on my skin.
I spend the day in the study, brow creased in the centre, a new vertical line that’s there now even at rest. I catch it in the mirror in the evenings. It is still there. The light comes in from the left in the morning, then moves across me, until, now, past six, and it has made its way across to the next window, then west and west gain, up past and past the day-today, past the big road too.
I drink another coffee,
I walk around the block,
Someone drops a pamphlet on one of the pots on the doorstep for mutual aid.
They open the latch on the gate, I say hello and thank you, even though I don’t know what they’re doing. They relock the gate.