I pick up a pebble and feel the power of the sea and it always calls me.
But here, in this season, I'm aware of leavings even as the cuckoo calls hope from the distance, unseen.
Even as I see ring-doves on the rooftops, nuthatches returned to our garden oak seeking grubs.
This street's a crook, a hook to hang a hill on.
Sometimes a police helicopter hovers in the night sky with lamp-eye trained on the moors.
Who is on the run?
Will the fox get back to its den?
Sometimes you look out the window to find everything changed : a flashing light and open midnight door which has remained closed far too long.
Yet this season has its own music of readiness, of openings as bees are timely in their comings and goings from a gap in the paneling they've made their own.
Tulips closing with the dark, sleeping through a panic of lights, of a fall, of finality.
Cats know no boundaries.
In dreams I wander like one over lines, walls, by streams and nobody shouts at me.
No leash, but there can be a chase : running against a wind, legs in muddy sand or arms underwater, straining.
I live on Question Street, but who is asking?
I pick up that stone and clutch it , so it takes me to another dimension.
Question Street becomes Question Island again, yet I still don't know where it begins and ends.
Out into the darkness , carried away by a wave even though the sea is a memory.
QUESTION STREET
I have lived here long enough
to know this street's the shape
of a question mark.
One by one the lights go out
as houses are vacated.
Soon they'll all be gone.
One night the ambulance arrives,
its doors left open,
couch and tubes waiting.
I look out for familiar lights,
for the insomniac windows,
the moving silhouettes.
See too much darkness,
too many hedges overgrown,
grass weedy and long.
Where do they disappear to?
Moon and stars won't answer,
no notices in the paper.
The street has no full-stop,
it's curved like a hook :
fishing for doubts again.