The Pot Geranium

I know one blipper who will be delighted to see this if he sees it.
You can’t imagine the thrill I felt when I looked across to the rather dilapidated home that was once where the poet Norman Nicholson lived and saw that there was a pot geranium in the attic window. I could have cried at the thoughtfulness of someone that has done this. Millom, and the area, is so deeply interesting, so deeply depressed, and seems pretty friendly.

Fortified with antihistamines I have come down to cat sit my work colleague and friend’s ancient cat whilst they are away on a long holiday.

I stopped on my way at somewhere I think Veronica will recognise well (extra) and then, once settled in and I’d found the cat and established it was probably still alive, I went for a walk along the coastal path. It feels like another country down here and yet the same county.
There’s a bath, a fire, wild garlic and even trains!

THE POT GERANIUM by Norman Nicholson

Green slated gables clasp the stem of the hill
In the lemony autumn sun; an acid wind
Dissolves the leaf stalks of back garden trees,
And chimneys with their fires unlit
Seem yet to puff a yellow smoke of poplars.
Freestone is brown as bark, and the model bakery
That once was a Primitive Methodist Chapel
Lifts its cornice against the sky.
And now, like a flight of racing pigeons
Slipped from their basket in the station yard,
A box kite rides the air, a square of calico,
Crimson as the cornets of the Royal Temperance Band
When they brass up the wind in marching. The kite
Strains and struggles on its leash, and unseen boys,
In chicken run or allotment or by the side
Of the old quarry full to the gullet with water,
Pay out on their string a rag of dream,
High as the Jubilee flagpole.
I turn from the window
(Letting the bobbins of autumn wind up the swallows)
And lie on my bed. The ceiling
Slopes over like a tent, and white walls
Wrap themselves round me, leaving only
A flap for the light to blow through. Thighs and spine
Are clamped to the mattress and looping springs
Twine round my chest and hold me. I feel the air
Move on my face like spiders, see the light
Slide across the plaster; but wind and sun
Are mine no longer, nor have I kite to claim them,
Or string to fish the clouds. But there on a shelf
In the warm corner of my dormer window
A pot geranium flies its bright balloon,
Nor can the festering hot-house of the tropics
Breed a tenser crimson; for this crock of soil,
Six inch deep by four across,
Contains the pattern, the prod and pulse of life,
Complete as the Nile or the Niger.
And what need therefore
To stretch for the straining kite? – for kite and flower
Bloom in my room for ever; the light that lifts them
Shines in my own eyes, and my body’s warmth
Hatches their red in my veins. It is the Gulf Stream
That rains down the chimney, making the soot spit; it is the Trade Wind
That blows in the draught under the bedroom door.
My ways are circumscribed, confined as a limpet
To one small radius of rock; yet
I eat the equator, breathe the sky, and carry
The great white sun in the dirt of my finger nails.