Peter McDonald

The glen

There was a garden behind the labourers' cottage,
studded with white and blue, yellow and orange,
where waves of flowers and walls of trained roses
ran down a slope into grass, to the point
where shrubs and trim hedges marked a boundary;
beyond that, weeds and brambles, a tangle
of nettles and docken as the ground dropped
down finally into the glen. Trees spread over
the gap, and beneath them was darkness, the sound
of branches and leaves; sometimes, from underneath,
water invisibly going its own way.

So the boundary was a sheer edge, the slope a drop,
and the bright flowers had a shadow behind them
that could speak sometimes over brash colours
and mumble into the cottage's dry parlour
something fearful, or to do with sorrow,
a hard thing, extreme, just inches away
and unavoidable; no words, not an inch given,
but the glen still running behind everything,
always there at the end of a packed garden,
and me listening sometimes,
between us only the simple matter of falling.

(from Adam's Dream, 1996)