The Sunset

Crow stood on the graveyard fence. Black sillhouette against the gathering twilight. Cross the road. Looks at me in a fixed, but strangely heroic way. Remember a friend telling me of when she fell asleep in the Pavilion Gardens, and the crow she didn't hear, fluttering through her dreams. Up the hill, rumours of sunsets I can't see. A sudden rush, overwhelming scent of cut-grass and summers. A father and son playing cricket in the churchyard, between the stones, watched by the crow and the ghosts said to gather here.
Deep-spring bursts banks and floods the air, and walk away from the churchyard. Down the end of the street, on a slight rise, a line of white houses. Like facing an army. Wide windows open onto first floor rooms. Beyond that, wide windows looking out onto another wideness I can't see. Windows facing windows. Usually unnoticed, but now - the sunset. Deep red, a bloody blazing in the living rooms I imagine to be empty. Strangely beautiful and awe-inspiring, the latter meant in it's original sense, almost. These first floor rooms bright with captured sunsets that cannot stay captured for long.
Brings me back. Another spring. No. Summer. High summer. Last year. First night of the canal holiday, and the same song playing on my headphones then as now ('sodore e sangue' by Madre del Vizio). The same sunset also. Leaving the canal boat to walk under this bloodied sky. Searching for Bridge 39. Should have looked on the map. Five miles away. Thought it was around a few corners, twisty towpath curves. Shropshire Union labyrinth. Found myself snaking through fields, walking with the water, in nowhere, and twilight gathering about me. Looking for a haunted bridge in an English summer. beautiful and terrifying.
Walk past the sunset-haunted houses, follow the curve of the road round the gardens of the two buildings that guard the edge of St Annes Well park. Watch the blue-twilight shadow in the bushes, under trees and in the edges of the window frames. Curve and flutter, butterfly-slope creaking down timbers of beached ships, air all electric and half-erotic. Ghosts of June sent backwards, and there, across the road, a small cottage like a church I've never seen before. And in front, a tree, still naked with no leaves, and I think; the perfect symmetry of the tree, flowing river-curves and matchless equations, and behind it, -behind it all- the sunset, spreading across the horizon, reaching outwards, devouring the day, the city, the stars, the grass, the earth, the sea, taking everything.
(Watching it from a scene in a dream, once, a single line, that makes no sense 'we are not of the earth, we are of the moor')
Last road to cross. Night-scented stock. Dark flowers, and they send me falling back through the years. Time-lapsed at the best of times, and on these deep-spring nights, when there is no time -not really- well, I could be anywhere, and everywhere.
A sense of certain victory in rumoured wars.
Out beyond sleep.
And I am home before the street lamps come on, and I think that,yes, summer is here,