I walk the line of of a high-wire fence like a lesson in a book
Park bowling green church graveyard playground school
On the other side are gravestones toppled by a ground ruptured by time
And I am learning I do not understand the topography of this place
I am from wild open country I am foreign to its smell its forms
The way its people organise themselves around its features
But I love you through and through so must leap to love this place
So I let it seep behind my skin I let you abandon me to its symbols

On the ground is a yellow ball I kick the yellow ball
It is as though I am booting the sun
I am kicking the planets wishing myself into orbit space
Something softens in the hopeful light of this yellow
The yellow tells me like sun falling through a window you were born here
You would have been led by the hand to the park
You would have been ushered shy as you are into the school
To hang up your pump-bag on a hook with your name
You would have watched the bowlers through summer-squinting eyes
Looked at the shadows of the grave-stones on uncut grass as I do now

Belonging makes a pathway through the sap of things
There is a passing down of this liquid from mouth to mouth
And so there are these doorways and people
A singular body of water channelling or a single hole through which the spring breaks
Or the eye of an animal or of you my dear as you catch a glimpse of light
Or the moist sap of a tree or its breathing trunk at the first sign of Spring
There is something thawing in the ache of suffering
It is being slowly sweetened it is wine it is honey or nectar in my legs and arms
Honey on bread as we came in from the dew-ridden garden humming with bees
Smell of wood-sap on the skin smell of fresh-mown grass in the hair
Smell of whole days on the beach and the excitement of pennies in our pockets
And the pier and fairground pure delight

I make the shape of these words on paper like icons
And simply let myself through into this single word
It drops as I know to stay not to leave
Real is this water that does not run dry
It is lying next to you under sunlight beneath the sheet