GOLDEN OCTOBER

they are calling this month, this year.

And who wants to miss
the golden month,
the golden year?

So I tuck my auto-antibodied
phenoxymethylpenicillined feet
into golden sandals
and find a tree.

Up between the branches
I see wing curves drifting
and between my toes,
leaves crackle.
'Auburn,' I tell myself. 'Not rust, dry,
dead, bones.'

And when the light falls a certain way,
I can almost believe what they say.

© Shaista Tayabali, 2014

I am beset by infection. Three of them playing havoc. The dentist informed me that my wisdom tooth infection could be life-threatening if I was unlucky. Shall I add that to my other life-threatening illness? (I didn't ask, but thought.) He is rather dishy (for a dentist), so I grinned on the outside, grim on the inside. And fled. 

Golden October sun this afternoon so I take a book and Ming's pen out for a walk. I sit under the horse chestnut, meaning to read quietly, but my landlady's son has spied me, and keeps running to me to discuss conkers and pick pieces of bark to make conker and bacon-bark sandwiches. My legs are stretched out before us, making handy tables for our bowls of soup… when his mother comes to collect him, he commands me to hold still, admonishing me even as he is lifted into the back seat of the car. Head skewed at an alarming angle, hollering instructions as she drives away. He is four.

When he is gone, I write about birds and dead leaves. And when I finish the poem, I see that I was wrong about the dead and the dry. The tree is the most alive thing. I can hear her shaking herself free, shrugging off leaves that curl and somersault after their own hula hooping sway to a soft crackling flump beside me. I keep thinking I hear footfalls.

I hold very still till Connor returns. 

Autumn in Madeira by Jacek Yerka via Magpie Tales

TOUCHING TIME

Tucked away
inside a wooden cabinet,
I find the Tibetan Book
of Living and Dying.

Books can save your life,
some say
they can even help you
die.

In Stanley Park I stand inside
a dead tree;
a hollowed out by time tree;
a rescued by man,
propped up by iron tree;

I feel nothing.

"You are touching time,"
my mother observes,
but the tree
says nothing
to me.

The Big (Living) Tree, Stanley Park, Vancouver, 1924

I have just returned from a brief visit to my family in Vancouver, to spend time with my grandmother who will be ninety this year and has become too frail to travel to her beloved England. I went with my mother, who is an easy travelling companion. Vancouver's trees are a glory - the scent of cedarwood and pine entwined with blue haze of mountains is a balm, but the Hollow Tree made me sad. It is raining in England now, the wisteria is no longer flowering but the roses are out... I like the living. I liked seeing my grandmother's cheeks still blooming...

In the trail of a tree

When I am in the garden, time stands quiet and still. Dried leaves celebrate beneath my bare feet. Bees and flies examine me for size, for harm, and muscle in for some skin. I politely decline, and the scent of green guages invites them elsewhere.

I turn to the trees. Trees make me gracious. How strange to long to travel, and see and touch the new, and yet have loved the same trees, in the same patch of green, for sixteen years.

I have loved other trees, in another garden, in that other world I belonged to. The trees of before were loved differently though. Confidently, posessively, smugly - the way you love a thing you think will never leave you.

Trees know things. What do your trees tell you?

Braillesong

Sunlight on a broken column

Of skin

Of dry grass and ancient bark

The afternoon draws quietly in;

Down by the silver birch

Mushrooms have melded into earth,

The paper is a script of lines

Old riddles I cannot find;

My fingers seek to solve

The mysteries of braille songs.