Gumboots © 2008 Rob Lock

Down to the allotment she goes, shedding
worries as she steps into her wellies,
honest John Clare her companion as she weeds -
slipping off the gloves she’s just put on
to get to closer quarters with the groundsel there:
chickweed, old man in the spring. She knows
the country names; she’s planted pansies
round the vegetables: love-in-idleness.

She stops to watch an ant, Clare’s pismire, scale
a Little Gem leaf, skirting grit splashed up
by last night’s rain. She loves its random busyness.
When the earth between the broad bean rows
is cleared, potatoes all shored up again, and
pleasantries with Geoff two plots away are done,
it’s time for home, for high-heeled dashing back
to deadlines, teenage angst, brown envelopes.

And does she know, as she disappears from view,
that as Mary was to Clare, so is she to Geoff?
He sleeps with her and wakes with her, his lips
are always touching hers. Can it be she does not
know? She wipes her hands and smiles before she goes
indoors, warmed by some unspoken line,
recalling student days when beauty, truth
and poor mad John were all she needed, all she knew.