I have recently been revisiting the excellent poetry of Ted Walker – the first four volumes of his work that I have had from the early 1970s – and have just bought two more that are new to me: one burning the ivy, published in 1978, from which this poem is taken.

The title of the poem made it apt to post here now, but I do so because it is much more meaningful than that. Having also recently thought about the loss of a good friend three years ago this month, and finding out that another dear friend has just lost his wife last week, this poem in its own focus on the death of friends and how one does, or does not, deal with this obviously resonates.

I won’t analyse the poem as anyone bothering to read a post here will surely be able, if they want, to do this for themselves. I will, however, observe that whilst a complex poem in many ways, it is Walker at his very best: ruminations on personal life and nature used to reflect on thoughts and feelings we all experience, but doing so in that poignant way great writing variously awakens, challenges and sharpens our own similar emotions.

Christmas apples

Year-long, weekdays, I pass an orchard.
Mornings, where its windbreak poplars are,
The engine warms and I change into top
Toward the day. There’s nothing to see
Of fruit-tress from the road. Blossom-time,

A dry thaw of blown petals may sift
To the ditch, soon gone; and winter nights,
When I slow for the corner near home,
Sometimes I picture the stiff ballet
Of trees imploring frost from starlight:

But, back in the warmth, forget them. Once
A year – a Sunday in December –
I drive to a warehouse at the heart
Of an acreage seeming vaster than
Memory tends. Black banners, crows flutter

High over the fields. I park the car
In an empty lot, walk to the edge
Of the same, leafless plantation where,
A twelvemonth since, my face to the wind,
I laid by the sorrows of a year.

There’s been another death: though by now
It has sunk under, like the water
Of small snow that fell the day I heard.
Once again (though to remember them
Is an ice along the skull) I call

To mind the gradually dying
Who haunt, more accusing than the dead,
These days I riffle at another
Year’s end. Month by month I have screened
Their lives from mine; today each mindful hurt

That love inflicts in fostering love,
Each mindless act of chronic neglect
That dismembers a friendship alive,
I would undo. In exact patterns,
Yet frantic as drowners, apple-trees

Lift bare arms into the shortest day.
I’ll not see them bud, burst into leaf,
Bloom, or their limbs bend when summer dust
Falls: my road leads by and beyond them.
Behind me somebody slides the door

And I turn and stare blank in a blank
Hangar. An appalling fragrance spills.
I breathe apples in before I see them,
Laxtons and Coxs, rack upon rack,
Shocking as a wiped-out flock of birds.