It
was the sort of sun that towed our children
into
the garden. The heat had ironed it
to
a bright stave, and there were midges about,
a
grace-note or two. Into his midget chair
we’d
worked our younger. On the steps my daughter
jumped
with her mad mates and I had some doubt if
there
weren’t too many children for one garden.
Think
of the sun dizzy in so many veins!
Two
gnats in their blood-crazy cosmos did not
have
to think. Like scramblers on a wall of life
they
knitted an insistent trail of guesses,
their
puny gravities joined like hands across
the
descending light. Or desisted and wove
figures
of eight. And who could blame them for that
between
the bird table and the apple tree?
Or
one dodged, a dragonfly smudge, the other
tumbling
after to shadow love down the sun.
Or
more came and they hung like elastic seeds
of
unapparent grapes, drunk upon daylight.
Or
a new one switched on: it would switch off soon,
like
all these atoms burning the atmosphere,
these
instant selves that hurried to outstrip light:
they’d
warp away, happy derelicts of time,
flickering,
playing. But before they had gone,
did
they not hieroglyph in our green cosmos
with
red backwater blood an unwearied god?
They
seemed so sure, I thought, that perhaps so long
as
the garden held such clever mites it might
just
be world enough for so many children.
