A Vision of Degree Day

Oxford! What change indeed is here!
Where are the sweets of yesteryear?

Now all the youth of Oxford are on fire
And dog-eared learning in the Radder lies.

Awake! For morning like a faithful Scout,
Has touched the switch that put repose to rout,

The Summer Term! What tales are told
By greybeards of the days of old –

I am so old, oh very old, my children,
   Ye that are so young,

Music and the Heart run hand in hand
Naked over the shining sand,

In the summit song of youth
A quiet quick catch of the breath.

Out of this questioning, eventual truth;
Out of this doubt, faith rooted in the rock;

Alone to walk the dripping woods of spring
   While daisies spy you?

Not vile, body, nor foe, flesh,
Your joys deluding, triumphs trash,
Fit to be foiled your every wish.

‘All things are flux: there’s nothing fast,’
Said Heraclitus, ages past,

This is where the water hurries under the archway,
This is where we enter the long tunnel,

Come death suddenly from the sea or cloud,
With the blast of thunder and the blinding shroud,

Spring held her fire
So long, the long pursuit, the watchers wondered
Would there be ever an end

Part of me for ever is the January morning
Coming into the Clyde in the frosty moonlight

My nine-hours son, so wrinkle-faced
Wry concentration of distaste
To find your Person so displaced,

The sun like a centaur leaping the ranges
Shoots to the heart my garden, shatters
The dew in a volley of wild carillons

When you were caught red-rooted in the drain
You wept of course, but did the same again

Like liquid silk in golden eddies
the honey laps into my tin.

The tree-trunk rounds, a fallen Doric column,
are tumbled on the grass beside my gate.

You are late coming home
To the house we share
An audible silence
Chills the air

No dolphin it was, but a six-month suckling whale
gashed and shark-mauled, tribeless, motherless,

They’re burning Old Sox’s shack
Just two weeks since he died.

My love, I watch you thread your way, and turn
with a small timeless smile, and trail your trolley
unhurried through the gate of no return.

Spring, at a bound. Once more the colourful chorus,
Daffodils first declare their lyric yellow,

Land of the singing light
Light that first I saw
Eighty years and more

… obliterating in instant mini-time
a universe of suns and planets
with or without their myriad forms of life,

Down arches of the years I hear your voice
explaining serials of our late departures,

Six years since your last birthday in our midst
seems yesterday, in this same so-loved house,

Wrapped in my gown of self-regard sublime
I heard your voice arrive from outer space.

Knowing the time was short
Yours was the instant thought
‘Let’s go up to the Rocks!’

Ten years since that incalculable day
When from all worlds we know you slipped away