Adam Horovitz — Dialect

Adam Horovitz Market Morning

“Have done with sorrow;

I’ll bring you plums to-morrow

Fresh on their mother twigs…”

~ from Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti

It’s an all-weather olive gobstopper

apple-in-your-pocket cheese-wheel-

swing-in-your-step sort of a morning

as under cover at the café

you warm your hands on strong coffee

and watch people run riverine

from smokeries to veg stalls

past butchers and sourdough mountains

waxy skull candles and glass that channels

the light of a lost Cotswold spring

round and on round

and round again

and again

A small girl in a strawberry onesie

skips between stalls and pillars

winds herself away from and back

to her parents in giddy figure eights

A half-serious smile

rises over strawberries like the dawn

as she manifests day-long patterns

out of the lessening rain

Oh, it’s a morning of Gore-Tex and wool hats

of all the muted, man-made

colours of the rainbow shambling in procession

A morning of people gluing the day

into place with coffee and samosas

as the slow song of a busy week

approaches

its lunchtime

crescendo

Half the town, it seems now, winds

around pillars and stalls in figure eights

juggling potatoes and conversation

with last night’s fever dreams

and the bag-rustle rhythms

of their morning purchases

They hear children’s whoops

a-clatter in the market’s rafters –

ghosts of their own childhoods

that catch on leeks
carrots, parsnips

in strings of metaphysical bunting

that call the town back to innocence

to the single-minded shriek

and wisdom of play

Yes, it’s an all-weather, sugar-laced

falafel-and-doughnut-globe

thai-curry-praise-song sort of a morning

in which home is briefly

a distant memory

a destination driven out by the rain’s delight

by spiced fruit on the tongue

A morning that rises like mist

through stalls sticky as promises