Aside

                  In Berkshire somewhere in 1970
          I hid in a laurel bush outside a house,
                               Planted in gravel I think.
       I stopped running and just pushed open
        Its oilskin flaps and settled down some 
kind of waiting room, whose scarred boughs
Had clearly been leaning and kneeling there
      For a long time. They were bright black.

          I remember this Museum of Twilight
           Was low-ceilinged and hear-through
                    As through a bedroom window
One hears the zone of someone’s afternoon
  Being shouted and shouted in, but by now
     I was too evergreen to answer, watching
                The woodlice at work in hard hats
                Taking their trolleys up and down.
 
             Through longer and longer interims
      A dead leaf fell, rigidly yellow and slow.
                  So by degrees I became invisible
                      In that spotted sick-room light
                         And nobody found me there.
            The hour has not yet ended in which
                                 Under a cloth of Laurel
                                               I sat quite still.