A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

Passage

Gail Anderson, Oxfordshire, UK

 

This old bridge brings him from the river: 

rough sleeper, sun-razored and eddying 

into the market square 

 

where headbent victory holds a scroll, 

extends towards earth her laurel wreath, 

this drifter cadges 

 

black Costa coffee, a cigarette, 

watches from a bench 

lycra cyclists click in and fly, starlings. 

 

He is a no-brakes man 

all downs and dip-slopes, 

river flows and passages, paused 

 

before the florist’s window, 

clipped anemones bright below a gable 

(where life hung 

 

over a tipped chair 

one Sunday last spring, 

coursed away as bells rang 

 

changes) he knows incision: 

as a river cuts shore from shore, 

staircasing to sea, 

 

as bronze cries verdigris 

over dead names on a plinth, 

as a mind flips to madness, bud-snipped 

 

histories spun to edgelands, 

seeped to gravel beds, 

not lost exactly, but hidden; 

 

divergence heels him 

back to the river, marking the fallen 

leaves of autumn, 

 

back to that first bridge 

arching storied waters still 

in the making.

 


 

Gail Anderson writes about water, nature and place. Recent work appears in Mslexia, Ambit, Crannog, Strix and The Cabinet of Heed. She can usually be found in her boat on the River Thames.

The Yield

Botanic Gardens Suite