Daily Poem: Watercourse ~ Ruth Padel
Watercourse
~ Ruth Padel
Our window is a drifting smoke
of rainlight, a cage of lichened thorn.
Pale grass, moor walls outside. Inside
there’s Schubert song and coffee.
Marooned in Plato’s geometric logic,
you sit by the fire,
looking like a nineteenth-century
charcoal sketch. Our daughter is due
in three months. You are sealed
and still. The goldveined eye
of shifting embers,
sound of the piano carrying
a hurt traveller’s voice,
one curly dog nuzzling burrs
from her feet on the hearth:
only these move. The bull
who alarmed us yesterday
is a streaming statue
in the farther field.
We are each other’s quiet
and concentration. No one
can reach us here.
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