What pleasures we might find
pass on.
Nothing to be done. Like air
they are not long

to be held. Fast shadows darken
fresh grass
and most of what we know
grows bored

inside us. Like the sadness
of money.
Like the measure of a median life,
a McLife

like this one, rising to fall, falling
to rise.
Yet here comes everyone—
one by one

they peep their heads,
creep out
from the dark to bud and spume
like wild

fire into a teeming forest. There is
something
mental about birth. You couldn't
make it up:

the fury in seeds. Death not out-
done. Death out-
doing us, our ceremonies,
reaching

for the intangible, the way
it drifts,
like mist from a scalded
teapot,

the tint of irises we never
notice
in the vase, in the corner of
the room,

until they're dying. Or that scent
of moss
in the cover of the wood, creeping
thistle,

greenfinches trilling in the brake as if
for us,
on that walk I never wanted to take
then dreamed

about for nineteen years. Oh lay
me low.
Convolvulus and daffodils, the glissade
of beech leaves.

Lay me down in a shaded glade, though I
could count
the woods I've walked through in the past
nineteen years

on one hand, and I've probably been
to Tescos
four thousand times, taking four times
a week

as a likely average. The soft prickle
of twayblade.
Fingers in the soil. Grass in the mouth.
Soft docken

leaves on buttercup-stained skin.
What I like
best are garden centres, the calm trickle
of their water

features, customers reverential in the
ambience
of high ferns and pot plants. If we could rip
the veil of habit,

witness the world truly, we would
throw up.
And I hear their low moan, a woman
and man

fucking in a supermarket
toilet
because they've had it up to here. Hands on
her buttocks,

he tries to look the way he thinks
he should
look, though his back hurts. Foxglove
and may bells,

hair on willow-herb, nipples, genitals,
cellophane.
He hopes she's feeling what she should
be feeling.

She feels the muffled sorrow
and need
in the breath of pleasure. When he comes
she hugs him

but can't wrap herself around all
this plenty.
Done, they close their eyes and cradle
themselves

in that blindness. Then, as we all do,
hoping
for the best, they creep through the door,
one by one.