The Summer Guests

If you stand in the garden on a summer afternoon,
she’s there. Always still,
in a dress like a scrap of ephemera,
white and silken, spider-webs,
woven by Arachne to cover her servant’s nakedness.

On the wrought-iron table would be lemonade and biscuits,
a smartphone left in the dying sun,
tossed there by a hand impatient to be done
with daily connectivity. The timeless quality
of love is what our summer ghosts have taught,
she in her Grecian spider-web and he,
a dapper-suited man emerging always from the path
that winds between the trees,
hands in pockets like a boy.

Sometimes they dare to mount the porch
and walk on through the French Windows
to sit in our armchairs, baffled by the “smart” TV.
Did you have TVs when you lived,
I sometimes want to ask,
or did you die with radio and wind-up gramophones?

By September-time they’re gone.
Their phantasms replaced
with autumn leaves, of orange and yellow,
like embers of the fire which
the local parish records state engulfed their earthly shells.

The next summer they’re here again
just as we’re setting out the tea
and sometimes look in puzzlement at us,
two men far away from nineteen-twenty-three,
behaving much like couples do.

Time passes, loved ones die,
the ceaseless mystery churns on.
But in the summer afternoon
a truce is possible.