Still Life

A new coolness edges into the room's dim corners;
the wasps fly lower today; autumn moves one breath closer.
Under the lampshade's crimson, the blue vase offers
berries beaded with light, and rust-scaled oak leaves
with vein-threads lacing each tear — as on a bank's rise,
the spine and ceiling of these slighter forms now spiralling
into waste: campion, sea pink, thrift, all softening
towards the same bruised mauve. Yet the monbretia glows,
seems hardly perishable, but for one shrivelled bloom,
ember-red beneath the wild-gold flames; and the honeysuckle,
waxen ivory, curves with the swan's sure poise, though
caught in the clockwise turn, earthwards.
Above the oaken table
each persists, changing. The convolvulus still trumpets
its white silence below the wasps' sound-shadows …
No other movement but for a colourless spider dropping
on its plumb-line beside the lamp's self-burnished stem —
it changes as it descends: pollen yellow, old gold, oak brown.
Outside the room, the sun blooms into the day's cool edges:
seeds float through the mist's grey plumes, green shadows of air.