after Raymond Carver
You leave your current self back at the house,
head for the moor in light rain, join the path
lined with sycamores, holly trees, silver birch,
a small glut of berries waiting at the tree line,
so you can grab your daily 10. You take a left,
through squat fun-size oaks, rowans ripe
and dropping, eyes on trip-hazard ground,
varicosed with blackened roots, into a clearing
where the hills map out to the west.
There’s farmhouse ruin demanding a post card,
positioned as it is so invitingly beneath a lofty copse,
the field in its foreground, day-glow green,
glossed by morning rain, latticed with dry-stone walls.
On the moor, you turn to its far edge, sit on the bench
where you’ve sat many times since you moved here,
where dogs have bounded over to check you out,
while a line tugs at you, a line that will fugue
into another, like a line is doing now.
Your current self waits for you back home.
That version of you isn’t doing so well,
the me that’s turned old in two months, moaning
about his health. The other you returns home, renewed.
full of hope, blank pages waiting, He’s far more interesting.
Look, you must be feeling better, referring to yourself
in the third person again, like when you update your website:
Mark is doing this. Mark is doing that. And listen.
Listen to the light clack of your wife’s fingers on her laptop.
When she’s finished her work for the day, you can tell her
all about your latest health concerns or maybe stick to your walk.
And, as Paul Daniels used to say, Just like that you’ll be okay again;
You’ll feel lucky, and you’ll have no-one to thank but yourself.
Mark Connors is a poet, novelist and creative writing tutor from Leeds, with eight books to his name. He is the co-founder of Yaffle Press and Yaffle’s Nest and lives with his wife, Gill, near Skipton in North Yorkshire.