Autumn Movements Poem by Julian Mann

I

What right have I under oak
To turn away a thought
When all now come mellowed
An august wind down the road
Turning lonely into this path
A grey-blue mark
Of habit before my haunt
Unweary of stile.

What say, when all this has been
Here and forgotten, over and again
And I remembering once more
This lightly aim
And another stranger's thought
No meaningful less
A bird sings at blackberrying.


II

To say I've done something useful
With a day always on the verge of rain
Clouds brewing blue that these thoughts need

If I find myself staring at the fallen acorns
And the road catching my eye
That is brighter
The underlight of today
Runs silver on the grateful grass.

No, simplicity is the order
Of windfall and not
The count of rain
After breath.


III

It is golden, it is streaming late
And leaning over the hedge
To leave a field margin in dew
and a welcome berry there

Turning my eyes' consequence
To fade up white on the grass
And the shafts on tiles, walking
To where three days' worth
Of honey led.

Far acorns, a painter's dots of light
Leaves doubled, shadows
Is the sun in my recline
Hoping for lost things in the close.


IV

I've seen autumn first
Up the hill road to Whiteleaf,
By a bus shelter under beech
Leaning from a paddock.

In a wood floor glow
Behind the barrow. Looked up, some leaves chose
To be see through before they were blown
Up! Upper Icknield
All over the pub car park.

She told me they're doing it up
Behind the inn,
But I was happy just to visit
And keep the place in a painting.

Those amber shifts of light
Are through a Tate window now.
Yes one of the flat white generation cares
About the sign for the lion and cross.


V

I wonder is it not the light
That inclines first to amber
After summer,
Which tomorrow some distant trees will answer
In yellow brushes, and not the leaves;
Their age honoured by afternoon;
Now spread across a shattered field
To puddingstone still lifes.


VI

A way to link the hills
Was a walk I never did

To understand inhumation
Map a thought ridge

Suggestion, dark woods
Are the shadows of a scarp

Notes: Blackwell Ln
Under bridge through farm


VII

The room always reminds the sleeper
Of the night when Charles slept here.
In the morning his men looked for apples,
Found the orchard barren, and were baffled
By mounds thereabout rising from the leaves.
Then they sat to smoke and talk of simple things.
But one soldier there of the every day said none;
Sheppey, a bird scarer, a bird scarer's son.
As his friends laughed, he thought, from the wooded steeps
To the passing smoke of morning in the hamlets deep.


VIII

The path, passing an old pit,
Was like another I thought I knew
Before I tried it; surprising me
As it found its way through the wood.

But first it was by a meadow with waves
Stopped still by recent dry days,
Grass bright as a dream
Or tree piercing light.

Before I went in, I looked back
At the grey glimpse of lane that,
Though quiet all its life,
Has been constant always
With the thoughts of old wanderers.


IX

Song for the nower hill,
through the gap in the hedge
from piano


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