AT HAROLD MARTIN
BOTANICAL GARDEN, LEICESTER

Walking by numbers
I follow my own path
Down a corridor of lavender
And beyond Bergamot,
Nepeta and Thyme, a gentle
Ragged presence

I walk up craggy steps
Turn back in time as
Bushes grow over the path
No names but one space in
An ark to house essence
Loveliness

Wilderness now, behind the gate
Another zone of deliberate light
As the body crosses the threshold
Prehistoric trees tough it out
Swaying in the air, re-introduced
From the Ice-Age

Through a boxed in hedge
Overhung by the jagged glass
Of a monkey puzzle, all changes

I have few names to drop
I’m looking for the familiar sway
Of friends who smile
With storybook leaves

I recognise little -
The soil is a devastation
A mulch, a carnage of twigs
Crackling under breathing foot,
Good for the living who
Grow up push down

And then its out into a sea of grass
The human space is verdent green
I want to lie in it and be king
Yet the uniformity troubles
My modern soul –

I get up and bump
Into Fibonaccis numbers
Beyond grasp, athough I’m told they
Inform the pavement’s swirl

ROOM SERVICE

The maids know the secret of the sheets
How you tossed and turned in your sleep,
Your doodles, restless intellectual curiosity
A calculated interest in stocks and shares,
Plus those kitsch presents above the cupboard

They know you as a new man, room 569
Only checking in for a single night
They never saw your blank face caught
In the mirror, resting between jobs, but they
Know your miasmic signature, its in the air

They need to contact you, know you
As they change your double sheets
Smooth an eider pillow, not carnally
As they hide a creased Playboy
In a lower draw, or even Spiritually,
Touching the red leather of the Gideon’s Bible

But to know a chubby little boy, tracing his
Willow and tree-house and racing car put traced
By a bored finger on a wet window pane
Before he left to kill another debtor in the
Rich suburbs, arranging a birthday suit