Iris

Wake this day of wakes and departures

to a swaddle of rain and fog throttling

the valley, the hill beside me only a more

solid grey outline on the wet canvas of a

cloud so low it’s taken the lake away and

left in place of its wind-chopped waves

a flat slash of brightness to catch the eye

and salvage the landscape from blankness.

Morning distracted by tasks. Silence my

only visitor. Blankness of the blank wall

my neighbours have to stare at, the only

son of the house laid out in the livingroom,

his mother and father eating their tears,

his wife a cloud of baffled silence, his child

of two trotting from flower to flower,

his friends embarrassed in their best suits.

The wild yellow iris I stood in a small vase

overnight has withered to a stub of a thing

the shape of a painter’s brush, a last trace

of colour still clinging, as if the artist

while painting the exuberant flower flags

had been interrupted mid-task and left

his wet brush there, a stump with its

memory of sulphur and gold, those

quickening shades. I see words again

won’t do, so I’m left with the brisk

idioms of rain, the rushing edgy swish

it is in leaves, letting the breeze be

its instructor. Silence otherwise, stepping

from room to room on slippered feet

like a dumb beast, a friend to the place,

sniffing out the right corner to settle in,

the way a soul in the old days might hover

over known ground, wanting a spot of it.