Of course, I am invited but barely: a so-&-so
tagalong. Besides, there’s no squatting
with a housekeeper this scrupulous—shoes audited,

breakfast logged. The bedroom, bigger than my flat,
belongs to a son off studying at Cambridge
—a sporty sort, likely rowing The River Cam

past the College Backs. Whilst outside his back
bedroom window, an Aberdeenshire storm
has made a mockery of the gardener’s algebra:

amputated branches strewn across topiary; russets
& gold rifled into rutilance; the honeysuckle
slain by a gale since shrunk to little more

than whisker wobble, on a fat cat, the next town
down. The pond is most heavily handled of the lot
—water loss & a debris of petals & spiders

filling its belly. Nibbled by the few surviving fish,
these little dead aliens bespangle the aquatic
undergrowth—their sinking vessels

catch morning’s, still-standing, moonlight
through the film; illuminated, a spectral dance.
I’m also here because of a storm, the one that blew

through & snatched you away. Though I’m thinking
more of spiders now, their abandoned webs
& spindly falsetto voices surfing the wind—

not ones for sulking, they’d tell me every storm’s
a pantomime & today even the rocks are bowed
in rapture. So, perhaps, better this peripatetic

shape-shifting zephyr for a swansong,
than a portrait fixed by a nail. As if to settle it,
a frog, stock-still, juts up to sing.