So. The tyre was serpentine, on a wrong
sized wheel, bursting its steels. "Bloody lucky
to be alive," said our break-down man. "Chee!
Didn't it die just right, flat over-night!"
Taking worry down to sweeter money -
not axle, suspension, tracking. Phew!.
Got local garage to supply a tyre.
Vicky having come from Cambridge, we go
to Holkham woods to drift along the main tracks
and 'The Theory Of Everything', THAT film!
Let them walk / talk on as a sound stills me.
It rises from deep creaking to raw roar,
several times, two locations. Animal.
Muntjac* maybe. But wait. Creak more like Ent -
then out comes that dark roar. Yet creak replies.
Mystified as to what I really hear,
and in succeeding silence I make shift
to catch up with the troop. Daughter confirms
she heard something too as she ambled by.
We find the high, pine swing over sand-hill,
walk back along the outside of the wood
in the drizzle, happy enough. Blotches
blurs and Vicky waxing lyrical, since,
back from Egypt, the Englishness strikes deep
of the delicate, faded colours of the day,
and the light round the edges of the grey,
the reeds, the fields, the wooded rise, dusk's edge.
And back to car and smooth slide into night.
As we slow down to turn off to the lane,
in the car lights a muntjac turns a flank
and through the hedge into my mothers place:
so deer frequent here when we are away,
with strutting pheasants, rabbits' dozing ease
scratting hens, song-birds' sweet-tongued weave, where trees
blossom in secret and save for gardeners'
bought-in grass-cuts, solitude gathers shades.
.................................
*Muntjac deer are a very small deer species of South Asia. Escaped from Woburn Abbey estate in 1925, they may already be the most numerous deer in England.
YOU ARE READING
Greenclad.
PoetryIvy-jacketed, December oaks on road-borders shock their stark gestures at us now, through sun and sleet, that January will yawn at and February, propping eyelids, will desperately ignore, longing for blossom; and making do with the least of anything...
