The Lesson
for Vim
On my back in the pool
as the morning sun sweeps round
from behind the hills
and swallows skim the surface of the water,
I’m staring into the blue.
And it feels like falling.
Like falling upwards,
sudden and vertiginous.
Disentangled from the net
of light that laps around me,
beyond the filmy globs in my eyes,
the wisps of white that float
above the valley slopes,
I am falling.
Falling upwards.
Into the blue, the endless blue.
And I remember asking you
as we sat beneath the wisteria
while your tears were drying
and lizards scurried into the shade:
“When does falling become floating?”
And you said: “You’ll know.
If you only let go.”
All week the red-backed shrike was in the acacia,
among its ripening purple pods,
urging her fledglings
into their first breathless
and uncertain flight.
*Stephen Boyce lives in Winchester. He has won the Kent & Sussex and Leicester poetry competitions and his work has appeared widely in magazines His collection Desire Lines was published by Arrowhead Press in 2010. www.stephenboycepoetry.co.uk
