for Jon Bowen
We’ve just sat down to eat a
salad/French bread
with bits and pieces, vaguely
rustic lunch when
I make some bland remark about how
lovely
it is to be surrounded by so many
trees.
‘Trees are the answer,’ Jon
remarks, and I
agree, but have no time to
register my
agreement as he comes out with a
measured,
‘it doesn’t matter what the
question is,’
before I have a chance to counter
with
another bland and uninsightful
statement,
like, ‘Absolutely,’ or, ‘Quite
so,’ or even, ‘Yes.’
Instead of making my unnecessary
verbal noises,
I get out of my chair and head
towards
the bedroom, where I write his gem
of wisdom
inside my notebook, knowing first-
class inspiration for a poem when
I see it.
And in the middle of the writing
of the poem,
a tiny grasshopper lands on the
table,
next to my hand. I notice that a
leg
of his his caught up in a fragment
of
a spider’s web. I let him grasp my
pencil.
I place him on a piece of wood,
remove
the little filament of sticky
thread,
and write. And when I look again,
he’s gone.
Like Jon, who’d gone back to his
vineyards after
our post-lunch conversation,
which, as always,
revolved around guitars and music;
laughter,
as always, punctuating all we’d
said.
The best advice I could have given
to my younger self
would have been a simple, Choose
your friends wisely,
Fergus.’ At nearly forty years of
distance,
I almost hear him say, ‘I did.’
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