Squirrel, hare, woods, grouse, words I guess

I’ve always wanted to put into a poem, and never
had reason to. It’s summer in England in Addington

and now here I am and here they all are
in the poem because I saw them all today:

reason enough. Nice words anyway. We’ll walk through
the spinney or the copse. Not the bush, not here.

My bedroom is the Red Room. In order to distinguish it
from the East Room, or the China Room

or the Apple Room. And because it’s red: walls of roses,
and a view of the rose garden from the window.

The Red Room is three hundred and eighty-six years old;
somehow I feel privileged to be occupying air space,

as if I feel the million breaths of the sleeping departed.
I’m in England! Jetlagged, but hey, fuck, I’m in England!

How does life happen, the way you get older, and it finally
starts to happen? The way the sadness and the happiness

finally make room for each other to just be there?
Doesn’t matter where I am. So that even in England,

in the sadness of the moving from, there is also
the coming to, in the blue convergences of summer.