The View from Four Ways

For Roy Fisher 

I stare out your window after you’ve gone: 

it needs cleaning: that Dragon’s Back racked with 

curvature of spine is further distorted by downward 

streaks of pollution. White peaks smear the pane 

dribbling the last gasp industrial past. Emissions.

If the day were not so bright it would 

be seen deep with the yellow of cowslips. 

I palm a filbert of your words. Grid your view. 

The walled garden is going forward without you. 

It’s a time thing. Moments slither into past. Arbor 

Low. Dow Low. The near-breath of the ouroborus 

tickles the nape. Teeth-nibble of tail. The smell of it. 

This place imbued with huge-winged shadows. 

This place where star-scratched dark glows fearless. 

Geraldine Monk’s poetry was first published in the 1970’s. Her major collections include Interregnum, (Creation Books 1995) and Escafeld Hangings, (West House Books 2005). Her Selected Poems (Salt Publishing, 2003) was followed by The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk, edited by Scott Thurston, 2007. Her last book of poetry They Who Saw the Deep was published in 2016 in the United States by Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions. In 2014 she became an affiliated poet to The Centre for Poetry and Poetics, University of Sheffield.   

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