COUNTING SWALLOWS

In which direction should I turn my face?         

It’s time to pull away the ties that

cleverly ensure my misted eyes stray

no distance from the ground until, bound to blindness,

I can see the irony of the right I’d claimed,

on any issue, to be first to engage

or ask you, piecemeal, for release.

 

I always understood release as freely available,

amid the bustle and tussle of virtual life

marshalled set to fight, to reinforce or pause

bloodless battles for causes born of microcosmic wars.

As for engagement, I’d stab at a stanza or pick at a page

that might start a story; and sometimes, via honest passage

and goodfellow friends, splutter to a clumsy end.

 

Did I over-envy your greater skills,

your lack of need for potions and pills?

Therein lies a likelihood or so: you simply had

the edge – so sharp at points – in what you had to offer

in commitment and instinctive belief; and – what

we had always thought to share – your deserved accrual

of garlands you lodged coquettishly in your hair.  

 

I had every intention of letting all this go –

perhaps a certain nobility of mind might

be won if conspicuous – albeit sub-Herculean –

deeds of valour were broadcast widely round

the towns renowned (albeit between themselves)

as collectors, custodians and curators of the arts –

all very much in futuro, all to be done.

But we had been drifting for some time,

well before the story I’m struggling to portray could be

said to be seminal by reference to direct responses

rising from guts to goatees of our local Parky party.

I joined and thought that this did somehow bring us closer; 

but we all knew the old adage about one swallow

and it resonated, deeply, inside me – and in you also.

 

Over the years we both counted visiting swallows and

I think it is fair to say that I spotted many, you a few.

We both knew, though, that work all too often meant

an acceptable absence, so work was found to augment

absences on both our parts. And a regime was created for R&R –

a spot check on permissible contexts and acceptance of incentives;

and another for the breaking of bread and all else sacred.

 

I do fear that the counting of swallows may,

in the early days, have been overkill (without the skill);

yet, towards the end, perhaps insufficiently willing to

illustrate a new phase or a further page on social media.

Whilst I would carp about such gaudy shop frontage,

it was of second division priority ranking. More critical was

refuge for abusers, on which you spoke and I ticked the boxes.

 

Ten years have elapsed since becoming a

paid-up Parky member, ten years down (yes, down)

the Parky road; and you, dearest of friends and lovers –

for such would, in context, hesitate to confound the mix by

reference to the status of carer) might one day,

at a safer hour, wheel me to and round the common land

where twice a year an itinerant gypsy band displays

 

further dangerous and endangered rides and stunts.

Yet the “waltzer” seems to have won a reprieve, so we

cram on board; but I duly refuse to hold tight on the halter,

willing this bronchial machine on and around, on and around,

praying that I might, please, be spun off, please don’t falter.

But soon our conveyance stutters to a stop; and they

brush our hair, straighten our clothes; then push us home.

 

And the loudness of the silence all around me

is enough to surround me and to clown me, while

you blow air in and out of your lungs, subservient

to the new you – one I cannot woo. The new you

is a safe, straight-laced, firm base comprising

make do’s, lean-to’s, where are you’s? This last will ever be

a scream, so, cognisant of the paucity and pain

of the shake-awake status of the “I” in this story,

there is but one tear left somewhere deep inside my chest,

perhaps to spill over and out when I realise each

half-heard word will always be stored as one half-received;

and the half-sent will be discarded, forever lost.

 

Such is the love that once stood proud, only to slip

swiftly through our sixteen fingers and four thumbs –

as we both agreed it could – and, if of matter, to be atomised,

when its use had passed. And such is our love of the swallow,

enviable in its migrations and exquisite endurance, startling in its

aerial display yet humble in its style; one will not make a summer

 but we will count them from now to avoid an early winter.