The time has come to move. Uncleared for years cut short,
our loft like unkempt pollard is outgrown, cut short.
I must prune the thickened boughs, bear with me only
leaves that memory will condone and not cut short.
Now in a homemade box compact my paper life;
jam-pack it full with keepsakes, touchstones to cut short.
At this set height to clear the head and light the path,
give underbrush its space, in overtones cut short.
Today the loppers turn on friend and family:
every corner of their postcards, far-flown, cut short.
Jumbled bundles of varied gloss and clarity -
the squeezed dispatches, long disowned, become cut short.
Right angles frame the lost face values, and I too -
beset by reading their halved backbones - am cut short.
This is my forgetting: choose some scaffold branches,
a gnarl of moments to retain, be known, cut short.
Pledges, protests, pleas and censures. When winter-made
these wounds save sap from weeping, as it groans, cut short.
The lid creaks closed. Held in a knobbly, ivied trunk,
such unfinished contexts as Mark alone cut short.
xii.2016 - i.2017
