Trees

What to us was a park lined

the drive up to that country house

where The Beatles’ maharishi

made arguably plausible claims.

Damp yews turned out to be

promises made but not kept.

At that age, of course,

we raced amongst them,

played war games in thickets

on the far side of ploughed land

which led to Bridego Bridge –

a 1960s topography.

Where Beeching’s cut line

swung around the border

of an aristocratic estate,

we fired air pistols into bark.

Dunstable lovers came out

to woo in secluded lanes.

We were already there –

witnesses and irritants.

In the decade’s last evening,

we marched home, immune

to sunset and shadows,

a geometry of trees.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Atanaska

How your blue eyes stopped me.

Your exhausted mother was out for the count.

In that small room we’d been moved to,

upstairs somewhere

in the maternity hospital,

a nurse came in and handed you over,

asleep for the moment,

and I was like what now?

No more than one hour old,

you woke up on my knee,

took a look and went back to sleep.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Baba

A face is etched at the years’ expense.

In the longest of runs, something reached at

comes down to a look, a landscape,

a placement – to the particular

arrangement of time and space,

and then, sobering, biology.

Emotions tumble like circus gymnasts.

In the longest of runs, it boils down

to discoveries in the asteroid belt

and this etched face.

We'll say ‘I’, of course, but pronouns

are always more than

the first word in a story.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

The Old Bridge in Winter

Because I only remember the place in summer,

it will never be the same, revisiting

arrangements of wood and stone,

angled balconies, shuttered windows –

the histories I thought to decipher

by running my fingers against the grain.

Too cold for that now. And the trees

have sharpened for winter,

thinned along a softened horizon.

What’s fixed here’s illusion seen

in different weather, affirming the old thought

that every return is also an arrival. 

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips