A Poet Returns From Rydal Mount And Visits His Own Grandmother’s House

Reflecting in the low sun off the top of the moor
a blue plaque now hangs above Nan’s front door
all of her earthly possessions lovingly restored,
the dresser, the writing bureau, the sideboard
containing the war, and you can have a go
with the Ewbank on the parquet floor

it’s like it was seventy years ago or more, historically forged
and all the things I ever pawned, painstaking sourced

an abandoned game of Canasta
and from the day of the Burnden disaster
a newspaper facsimile burns in the parlour
as three porcelain ducks fly across the chimney breast,
forever returning west, towards the silver cabinet
where the cutlery slept, saving itself for best

her Victorian music box, wound every day at 10 o’clock
plays Au Clair De La Lune, then falls mute as a tomb
the little hand on her wrist watch, now stopped,
always pointing to noon

you can see where she knitted and read, put us all to bed,
where she ate, slept, got everyone dressed,
where she eventually came to rest
and I found her dead

now that’s all in the past, but I’m thinking back
to how the girl in the gift shop held my stare
and was a dead ringer for her

reminding me of our transiency
like the stream at Dove Cottage
still running through the buttery.