Category Archives: Seasons

Goldberg Variations

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She was seated before me
Listening intently
The lines of her fair neck
Curving so gracefully
Down to golden shoulders.
But it was her long hair,
Plaited nonchalantly,
Which so distracted me.
From a thick auburn crown,
Three separate tresses
Set out resolutely
On their downward journey
To the small of her back,
Meandering slowly
In time to the music,
Now above, now below,
A rare relationship
Of three equal suitors,
Intimate, enfolding,
Sinuous, caressing,
Each lover approaching
The other obliquely
With the same strategy,
Now from left, now from right,
Abandoning thin
Sacrificial wisps
En route,
Each fusing finally,
Molten sand, copper, gold,
All capitulating,
Exhausted totally,
In the baroque coda
Of a black silk ribbon.

Written in St Gallen, Austria, during the music festival in Schloss Gallenstein.
August 1994

Cow Parsley

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This year there is a
Splendid crop of cow parsley
In St Peter’s Valley.
I know you think it funny
That I should love this
Tall ungainly flower which
Grows head and leafy shoulders
Over scarlet campion
And ragged robin,
But its clouds of faded white
Are the saving grace
Of many a marshy field.

1968

To Samuel Palmer

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Now breaks the snowy may upon the hedge
And Spring the orchard fills with waves of white.
High sails the full-frown moon across the skies
And floods the dreaming sheepfolds with its light.
The early shepherd plays upon his pipe
And calls the distant dawn across the night.

In Shoreham’s fields the mystic grain still grows,
The wheatsheaves ripen in the August sun,
The spirit whispers in the sacred groves
Of lives well ordered and of work well done.
In valleys thick with corn dead Virgil lives
And through your visions speaks to everyone.

October 1980