Second poem from long ago, in memoriam Mhairi

By Tracy

Outside the glasshouse

I lose you for a moment and then catch sight:

crouched under twin camellias you approach

with the lens as one might

a timid animal,

allowing them soul.

I hold back: double pink, double red,

such richness best at a distance

or I am swamped

unless it’s instinct

tells me not to intrude

between you and the beauty

of your own response.

Starvation for months

and now this glut of colour

almost insulting in its abundance.

Not all at once

but bud by snub bud they unloose

their vivacity, raised cups

we’d slake our hurts at

if we could only trust

they’d last – longevity

and faithfulness, the books says

so you store an image

to paint them from

like tracing and retracing

a lover’s name.

                     — Tracy Ryan

All these photos were taken by Mhairi in the Cambridge Botanical Gardens, which gave me the central idea for the book Hothouse, from which the poems are themselves taken.

Poem extract

By Tracy


From "Cowslip Orchids: for David E. Musselwhite", published in Hothouse (Fremantle Press/Arc 2002/2006) pp. 97-98.


3

Which of us is gone
which away from

this is a third space
word-made   uninhabited

the flowers are asterisks
contested passages

if flags   then yellow alert

nothing less certain
than what the world gives

a waxen solidity
      that passes

grass that receives
our tread and erases
all flesh is

      yet how we grasp.