Two Poems by Philip Gross

Settlers

of the after-days, bareshod in the dust,
keeping low to the blown grit,
bedding in between the gravel,
living long enough
to bind a clutch of soil,
their tiny acre,
dying to some purpose, feeding humus, still
flying the bright little flags of their names:

ivy-leaved toadflax, for which every wall
is finger-hold; birds-foot trefoil,
daisy, scarlet pimpernel,
hop clover, hawksbeard,
first raft-islands of grass,
with rumours of the frontiers
creeping inwards;
soon the stringy graspers of ground elder

with its sapper’s work, its outposts – try to tear
one up, its rhizomes rip the ground
like a sizzling fuse;
promiscuous ivy, stray
feral exotics, escapes,
non-natives,
at home beside lady’s bedstraw
with its honey scent, oh and homely self-heal,

weeds, lowlife, their droughts and despairs,
their dustbowl treks, chain gangs,
their revival meetings,
anonymous moss,
all the unnamed
undocumented others. All they have to do,
it seems, is live. And that
is how the desert of the driveway is reclaimed.

The Water Feature, Summer Evening

A waist-high slosh of stubby gushers
in a calm park, as if bustling by (like us)
or (like us) lingering. It’s the effort, their churning to froth,
as much baffle as flow,

that’s the point. The late low sunlight
they catch is a weight, a thickening,
poor things: tame geysers, not the aristocracy of fountains,
not that as-if-casual cast

of fortune to the wind, to side-blown
mist that hangs, drift-net for rainbows
and other illusions. No, these are our height, at ground level
like us. You could mingle;

all you’d have to do is melt
to the moment, to water that’s white
not with rush but with a steady plucky trouble, each spurt
a step, a first one,

while we wait for clarity
to come, a state as close, as distant as the afterlife.

Philip Gross, born in Cornwall, son of an Estonian wartime refugee, has lived in South Wales since 2004. The Water Table won the TS Eliot Prize 2009; he received a Cholmondeley Award in 2017. He is a keen collaborator – with artist Valerie Coffin Price on A Fold in The River (Seren, 2015), with poet Lesley Saunders on A Part of the Main (Mulfran, 2018), with scientists on Dark Sky Park (Otter-Barry, 2018) and, in Troeon/Turnings (Seren, 2021), a 'translaboration' with Welsh language poet Cyril Jones. The Thirteenth Angel (Bloodaxe, 2022), a PBS Recommendation, is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.