norwich spring
the pinks and whites, i bless them. they bless us, strolling hand in hand between cherry trees with the scent of cream emulsion thick in the air, japanned pink. the flower and the leaf: we wander delicately in a new dawn led by april’s yellow hectares. the world, a gorgeous mote floating in my eye’s lazy afternoon, opened on the day before may hangs its linens out for the breeze to rinse blue and back to white. the world, losing its wits to drink up new greens.
the strip of moon lying across our bed reminds me of snow in the orchard. my thoughts, wafting across the foolscap page that i’ll discard, biroed and full of deep pressed marks, placed on the heap beside the bed. i saw a fox cross a strip of moonlight once, tracing the dark city as it left the cemetery or returned to the cemetery, knowing its own roads. this sure-footed moon lights up the tangle of telephone wires outside the window, makes silhouettes out of rooflines and chimney pots, negatives of the city communicating themselves to my mind’s eye. i should be sleeping, wrapped in quilts, but for the moon’s skyhooks urging this city up and away from late afternoon’s curls and the early evening’s cool, the turn of blue-silver dark nudging our hands to each other’s mouths, to each other’s sleeping cheeks and eyelids, surprising us into one graceful leaping self.
you partner my darkness. you take the pull of me and lift it. i lie awake writing beside your calmed form. the moon snatched me awake, stole away the covers from my mind, reached its fingers into our bed. with audacity it has marched me through orchards, lawns, frothy springtime, the fox slipping through unmanned streets. with simplicity it removed the props. now i lie unadorned in my bed, giving up my secrets to the old-fashioned page. i give, caused by the moon to spill; by the moon and you, sleeping placeholder, holding my mind’s eye and blinking it open. from the depths of dreams you cajole my moonwoken mind. you catch and note the swing, the lilt, the years spent cataloguing labyrinths and depths. you catch my spill, and i hold out these pages to you.
Emilie Vince is an East Anglian writer and artist with a fascination for representing internal and external realities. Her prose poem norwich spring is part of her new collection which deals with changing relationships, set amongst the East Anglian landscape and its developing seasons.
