Tony Williams

Mindful of Flowers

You can travel for days and not get here:

inwards, over the next hill and the next

and the next, through market towns whose suburbs idle

between the wars and the Methodist churches, objects

of dark stone with people in the middle.

In and back: you have travelled all these years

for nothing, the towns continue but not one

has a sign at its limit to give your hope its edge:

‘Please drive carefully through our horse-drawn

village, everyone is asleep and the bees are singing

forever forever forever in the vicarage

plot.’ Upstairs the vicar’s wife is sinning,

which fact is announced in the Parish Times

in a Latin acrostic drafted by the help

who keeps her learning and Catholicism

hidden — as the canopies of the limes

hide the graveyard from satellites which loop

entirely ignorant of the rustic orgasm

this place is, as you are ignorant of

the roads which lead to here and do not leave.

The friendly butcher stares down at his chops

when you ask; none of the pubs have vacant rooms,

and when you go, even the place’s name,

clear in the mind, sounds funny on the lips.

The Morning After

The pond’s bombed out, its crater

emptied and scraped clean.

We go out looking for water.

Maybe the public telephone

upside down in the empty bowl

will ring: it will be the swans,

thoughtfully ringing to tell us

where they were blown to,

and how it is peaceful there.