Beyond the gravel and the clay-stone stile,
where the small town narrows to a model,
I step into the vines and the last night-air
and wait for the dawn to come about.
In a loosening outhouse, in a flunk of linen,
you are still to the morning, not yet of this day,
and nothing should hurry you around;
not the sound of the milk-van or the baker’s kiln,
not the cockerel, and not my own hand;
though the sky is beginning to bruise,
and citrus lights the far field vines,
and, humbly, there’s a coming into colour:
the thin church, the reed of trees,
the green air whittling the river-grass,
stirring the first insects to gauze.
Watching this
is to realize how little comes of urgency,
how little worth-its-weight is, in the end, waitless:
the vineyards speckled with half-remembered homes,
their ghost of families, their trellis grounds, so carefully sown and stitched and torn, so
precisely brought to handle; where the must of pulp
is honeyed into ferment; where the skin is sensitive
and contact is measured to the minute -
that teasing brush with the body, unlocking
the tannins, opening the window of the wine.
Like the ullage - the breathing space I could never judge -
the balance of touch has undone us: that striking of patience
between presence and space, heat and the necessary calm.
No bottle worth its glass came from any less devotion.
And because you would not wait as I would wait
I settle instead for the gentlest reminders:
your flint of eyes, your pallor skin, your nettling
touched, but left untrampled, and barely stung.
