Garden

It’s been a while…..

I’ve been busy gardening for a bloke in Greenwich who’s never there.

Been given carte blanche.

Been distracted from everything else.

It’s great spending other people’s money, especially on a creative project. Trouble is, I can’t see the garden from my kitchen window or walk on the grass in bare feet when the dew settles or smell the paeonies at dusk infusing the air with their slightly too sweet fragrance. I have to give it back….

It’s been hard work. I’ve wrestled with waist high grass and yanked out distorted quinces and untangled roses and found Jerusalem artichokes and the most glorious small blue flower which as yet remains unidentified. And the best thing? Stepping into a cool shower and feeling hot skin soothed.

Slim edge of desire,

a yearning for water.

Salt skin singed, hot and

rimmed with dry earth.

A face lifted to the cool

gasping shock,

spray spitting against the shower curtain.

Slide the soap, made cold from an open window,

against breast and throat.

A lava flow of greybrown grained

suds slips

from shoulders

to hip, thigh, shin.

Wash soil, spade, trowel from skin

flush tangled roots from pores

leave my garden, your garden, a perfect picture of glaucous blue.

Watch the foam gathering speed,

gathering

to pool brown between toes past

ankles white bleached with tapioca-ed nettle stings.

Taking a shower in mid afternoon

in not the cool sun of morning

but in the worked, earned buzz of afternoon heat.