Observatory / Green man

An introspection, a life
never quite lived,
A marginal existence
A summer spent waiting
for pheasant calls of autumn twilight,
Then waiting once more
for solstice frosts and Sirius nights,
and my heart then longs
for the dawn chorus of spring,
the return of my beloved Swifts

The mellifluous voice of my circadian rhythm
carrying me, quietly as a pallbearer
through the curtains of one season
into the next, and to it's successor.
Months pass in quarters, new, full,
twenty eight days, waning and waxing,
angles and orbits, equinoxes and solstices,
pockets fill with oak galls, feathers and bones

I see it all, I see every detail
and I remember each life,
each death I have witnessed
they are recorded, written,
Yet my very own life slips by
like a leaf on the surface of a stream
floating headlong towards oblivion,
A leaf etched with love lost
and the sigils of those departed

Scientists say to observe not see,
yet I feel, not see; I breathe, not observe
I look into the eyes, to see the life,
and to see the rheumy cloud,
the blink of ecstasy before death
I have taken a different path
I have submerged, sunken
to within the mycelium, a burial

And I cannot live here,
I cannot process the will of others
I am still a child, alone by the river,
learning to read again, to write,
To contemplate the stars
beside the red railway light
on my own, by myself, is all it has ever been

So I am found, beneath hedges,
Tapetum lucidum in evenglow
ageing with the lichens
contorting with the prevailing wind
as the stunted Hawthorn has,
cooling my murmuration brain
needing this time, needing to become,
to meld into this landscape,
to be unashamedly me, within and without.