The English Line

It’s clear why Sargent painted English skies, 
their clever way of changing before your very eyes,

 mesmerizing streetlights contracting in the rivulets, 
darkening the edges of the parish church. 

A relief, for an hour, not to think of you, 
to think of you as you, not a condition of me. 

Still I’m reading Thomas, Hardy, MacNeice, 
holding your hand through the English line. 

Between the graves and wildflowers forming 
canopies above them, I cross under lights 

strung on Little Clarendon. One end of the road 
is a shadowgraph of sun, the other, the brusque blue 

of autumn we expect sending every bloom back. 
Past sodden streets, the Thames at junctions 

we both know, signs pointing west to Jericho, 
and curtains in the windows of Summertown 

and Headington darkened by sunlight year and year, 
like long-forgotten signs slowly turning clear. 

To speak of the uncanny, the bagpipe’s drone of days 
until a note plays just above the hour’s staff. 

Wasn’t that how you entered my life, silk black 
ashes turning silvery white, in steps as silent 

as the turf they tread? Fleabane jutting 
between bricks, eyes flaring at the green speech 

of the adjacent fields. By your admission, 
you were never much sold on happiness. 

More like the magpie that presides over the road, 
feathers black as soot, white as innocence.