Keep The Home Fires Burning

Humid Days

Stepping out of the cool supermarket
to the botanical-garden-hothouse
of a car-park - trolleys groaning, trolleys rattling -
where, after warm rain, wet ground steams...

My dehumidifier
is attempting to dry a humid summer.
"Better put it on turbo, Dad," says Brendan.
"Need the Arcturan Hypermarket model;
but they are highly illegal," I say.
"Caused a trail of ecological devastation
across the galaxy.
Even dried out the interstellar medium -
anomaly visible to Hubble."

I have given up making sense of many things,

analyses among these trees dispersed
unpatterned, lost and tossed on breezes.

Imperial July is wearing the purple
rose-bay-willow-herb, knapweed, teazel;
and the first blackberries of the year,
(some as large and as succulent as those
supermarket green-housed imposters)
we stretch for, or nearly kneeling,
snake wrists and fingers round nettles
to pluck dark treasures, stain our fingers
with imperial juice and feed each other
the sweet and the sour as it is, as it comes.

Sun-glitter on the deep, wind-dinted river
as if light was raining hard and bouncing
off the dark surface of the sleeping beast.

But Haydn's pool has evaporated
to two disjoined broad puddles.
Of twenty six species splendidly
illustrated and robustly displayed,
we can see a single, forlorn shellduck,
who, without his 'S', would be a hellduck.

Wind sighs through the brake of
ditch-rooted alder and nettles
lining a midged green-lane.
One stinger leaf paddles the air  -
a (pinball) repeat. The rest tremble.

Rowan already has berry clusters red;
ragwort shines stellar conglomerates;
convolvulus has camped out at the end
of the descent, in the corner by field -gates.

In a ghostly wave, a row of trees
on their pathward sides 
have been strikingly whitened
by a fungal crust.

..