View of the Road

This is the first full poem I've written since October 2007. It has been rushed and will be edited a little over the next couple of weeks. Hope you like it P?

View of the Road

I miss the nights we lay awake
perched on our elbows
reading the sleeping street
from behind the open blinds,
the black bars of our bedstead
and our heavy headed sleepiness.
Our view obscured by the darkness
And the birch tree
that rung out with a thousand silver tongues
like a distant ocean.

On sleepless nights
when the spell of Faure’s “Pie Jesu” had broken
I’d watch for occasional movement
sculptured out of dark incubating shadows.
A fox rummaging in bins,
a cat’s majestic prowl,
a police car’s purr.

Some nights we’d wake together
to the sudden slam of a car door,
an unexpected cough,
or the wind wrestling the silver birch.
And I’d wake to see our rain sequined window.

And I remember lying on our backs
on lazy Sunday mornings,
watching the shadows of leaves,
and sunlight reflected off car windscreens
through the open blinds and dappled light
throwing pretties onto the bedroom ceiling.

But now the contours of this new road are different.
Instead of the silver birch
an open and exposed view of the road
and a disused telephone pole.
Only its bare wires to hold the weight
of the neighbourhood pigeons,
gold finches and long tail tits.

I watch them from the upstairs window
where I have only a muffled sense of the street below.


© David Loffman

5 June 2008