London trees (street, cars and buildings beyond), Oil, c.1960
(poor quality reproduction)


ON A PAINTING BY PATRICK SWIFT
David Wright

The eye, plunged in a foliage thick as water-
weed, a reticulated under-surface,
forgets and loses itself where, like a fish, a
fin- or spine-flick glints in Westbourne Terrace

as a car-roof flashes under leafy branches:
the unimaginable everyday
world, consulted from a third-floor window.
Those trees' Laocoön arms, light that impinges

on a pavement, its fall broken by their greenstuff
like water, here imagined and imaged
in oils on hardboard, not as a chosen aspect
but for being there; universal because.