Written Near Water

“Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.”

- Poem XL
― A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

Ordinary life creates
empty spaces
inside of me
composed of God-knows-what:
certainly, lacking in originality.

Pale-blue eyes
on a snowdrop face
seen-through lace,
seen-through lace.

Empty waiting rooms of the heart,
tear us apart,
these ventricles of the brain, never-again, the same

Birdsong flung
into fond recall:
a dry-stone wall,
a dry-stone wall.

The smokey-smell of coal and steam,
an evening’s desultoriness,
or, a girl’s slight distress
as she adjusts her wind-blown dress.