the tributary joins ‘the great river’, a marshland
watched over by willows and ‘high circling birds’.
Condors perhaps – they appear in the notes and
poems he was writing, under a foamy sky.

Huddled in a trench with the body of a friend
who’d been shot in the neck, he wrote with a pencil
stub in his notebook: patience flowers into death.
His wife’s face bloomed in his head.

Thinking of the petals of crushed flowers
floating in a wake of perfume, he wrote to caress her
neck. The fascists’ bullets wiped out his patience.
His written petals survive.

Today, we listen to the news of war
here in a river sanctuary my wife’s unbending
will has created – horizontal slats of cedar, verticals
of glass – a Mondrian chapel of light.

This afternoon just before dark the first
greenshank arrived from the Hebrides.
Ignorant of human borders, its migration
technology is simple: feathers

and fish-fuel, cryptic colour and homing
instinct. This elegant wader landed on a mooring,
got ruffled in the westerly, then took off again,
an acrobatic twister, and levelled down

onto a mudflat – a lone figure that dashed across
the shore, stood on one leg, then, conducting
its song with its bill, came forward
in a high-stepping dance.