Poems - Catriona Urquhart
‘ Hicks-Jenkins has emerged in recent years as one of the most powerful figurative painters in Wales. ’ , Re:Imaging Wales
 The Second Fall |
Pegasus You came back in June full of the wonders of Virginia and the Blue Ridge. We tackled the tomatoes: when and how to feed; 'only when the first truss sets', and watering; 'don't let them drown'; debated on the merits of simply lopping off dead roses as against a careful prune above new eyes; how early and how late. Your arguments won out, experience more telling than a manual's dictate. In August, you came here every day to keep your eye on things while we holidayed away. Temperatures soared. Now you are ill suddenly, gravely. in a narrow hospital bed. You're struggling, tucked taut as a bud of balsam, eyes trusting, innocent as bluebells. 'How did I get this? Where did it come from?' My chest tightens with the love I bear you but I only shake my head and proffer gifts: Fred Hando's Journeys in Gwent, a bunch of bright anemones, a flask of home-made soup. You take a mouthful just to please me; you have no strength to lift a book. Journeys are inner now my brave Odysseus, and you are drowning. I plunder mythologies for meaning. What stalks your strangled senses, tussling the sheet? Is it the Mari still? Is it careering there? Or are you now wild Neptune thrashing down sea horses, trident at your feet? I pray for Pegasus to wing you clear. Monitors bleep, sonar soundings of the depths you swim in now. Unfathomable seas. Sometimes you make a strike for shore and surface, desperate, panting, glazed; then sink back crushed by time's slow snake and how long it takes to make a promised place. All that Autumn the plants you'd watered for me bloomed to bursting; your pruning and pinching out bore fruit. Bishop of Llandaff flamed till Christmas; tomatoes, peppers, filled bowls and jars for weeks; cuttings took root. Catriona Urqhuart 2001 |
| Reproduced with the kind permission of the poet's estate. |