HENRY'S RETIREMENT

Setting down your tools on Christmas Eve,
sealing your long-cherished plan,
ending years of outdoor graft
and finding time now on your hands,
some savings and a living income,
chance to get to all the things
you never had the time to do
to house and garden, and the oil paints
that you haven't touched for years,
and trips to Scotland, Ireland, maybe France.

But, you found you didn't know
that the other things would happen:
how you'd miss the drudge routines
of getting up for work each morning,
how you've lost those colleagues, friends,
and small fulfilments gathered in each day,
and how the vast hole that this leaves
has suddenly blown open
and left you feeling lonely, lost
and purposeless -

a little like the way you feel
stepping into summer light outside
the dense, uncaring hospital
where someone that you love has died.

TAME

From our hands
we fed squirrels
for months before
one turned on our cat
who, in its turn,
lies curled on laps
in evening chairs
then goes out killing
for the night.

Our notion of taming
is fanciful and
disproved by each quick observation:

the tiger who turns on its keeper,
trained hawks who escape to the vast, open sky,
the untended plot which reverts to the wild
and lovers who whisper
sweet words, promises
then drop into bed
with some suitable mate.

Things choose to be tame when it suits them to be,
we never tame anything, really.

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