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COD AND CHIPS IN HOLNE
Rook, pigeon and dove: bird brains
sifting information as slow
as Dartmoor's seasonal clock
from their leafless perches
in a tree that is part of our framed
landscape, a window in a wooden
wall in the shop and tearoom
behind a car park in Holne;
the warmth of wood to support
vegetables, fruit, tins, home made art
and our orders of battered cod
with chips to be served by a girl
of the moor, a shy creature, a bird
with limbs so light but beak too soft.
All her customers comment;
hush words when they think she cannot
hear about her thinness, her flamingo
frame. She prepares a cafetiere,
as a long table of canoeists relive
brawny twists of paddles and reflexes
faster than the skew of the Dart,
and as we wait I look again
beyond the hunch silhouette
of my aging mother to see
winter gardens in a harmless tangle,
like her, and corrugated roofs beyond
like breeze that skims Vennford Reservoir.
Roofs that sit on stone, hard
as that which pushed up, which lasts here
to accept rain and emerald moss
as brother and sister,
whilst a motorcycle burns up
the grazed coat of a field
with collies in pursuit and rooks unsettled.
Cods arrive, white flesh in crisp coffins,
far from their water to accompany
soft fried potato; as out of place
here, together, as cake and war.
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