Meditações - On a Monday morning

The Park

Because anyone sitting still attracts desire,  

Even this will not be given you, the park  

In June, the silence of a bench at eleven o’clock  

 

On a Monday morning, or four on a Thursday afternoon.  

Someone will drift toward you, unattached  

And lonely. The spell will be broken, the wrong word said.  

 

It is cool, but there is no death in the few token leaves  

That must have come down last night, in the rain that freshened,  

The tree-smell that remains. For this season there is no name,  

 

Not summer, and none of the months of the year—  

A something inside you. Search your mind  

For the green arboriferous Word the boys and girls swing out of  

 

Like a tree, and the lovers  

On the grass in tantric mode, in an ecstasy  

Of untouching, and the human buddhas, legs infolded, reading.  

 

Branches, sheer translucent leaves—  

You would die to get under them forever, if it were given you,  

The park, on this, a day like any other day,  

 

And not the knowledge of everyone ever met  

Who will come upon you, sooner or later,  

If only you stay here. No, not people, or the walkways  

 

Made in another century, or the murmur of the great city  

Everywhere in the distance, but this breathing-space  

Where the void no longer terrible  

 

But to be relaxed in, the depressions  

Which anyway here are mild, incoming from the west,  

Slow-acting, chronic, lifelong not acute

 

Are there to be sat through, waited out  

On a damp bench, as a man sweeps up around you  

And the sun comes out in real time, stealing over the ground.

Harry Clifton