A Walk to the Paradise Garden

…loading galaxies of flowers / like night sky's sprawling fire

– Martin Harrison

I

When you and Martin talk about a stone-fruit orchard,

rare Coeur de boeuf tree-stock,

you fill the dusty café terrace near St Sulpice

with persimmon, lavender in pots,

bramble, Japanese pear,

                                     even those flowering plums

which appear as galaxies in one of his poems.

So – you can rustle these up, easy as stirring your coffee…

That must change something.  Not friendship

perhaps, but the way language

cuts between gardens

on opposite sides of the globe –

Vale of the White Horse, Hunter Valley,

the names bring you home

as they plant themselves round you.

II

…All summer, waiting for summer,

you're pale, as if you lived

in a mirror's silvered interior.

It's the Jet Stream.  Expect worse to come.

Well… You want an out-size sun

to open overhead, as a sign

of how things could work out,

your neighbours' voices

ringing through fine afternoons,

skylarks springing

    their high spirals.

Instead, rain soaks a lawn

crowded by roses, daisies, thyme –

where someone's laid a clutch of pebbles

on a bench under the ash.

So perhaps the grass isn't empty, but thronged

with ghosts strolling hand-in-hand,

the end of the world

reflected in each others' eyes.

Strange, that the New Life might end

with a garden, provincial measure you started from 

(remember the wooden summerhouse,

that robin, quick with instinct

at your feet…)

 the suburban paradise

locking its gates around you

just as you feared,

on afternoons that smell of grass and rot –

the life between slipping away 

and you, childish, among light and shadow