Chestnuts

Painting by Norman Rockwell

Chestnuts

The days of acorns, walnuts and horse chestnuts,
Twelve or so if memory serves,
we smoked from pipes
As clear as yesterday in an old and beautiful world.
The fields, the walk through the fields
the countryside spread out for miles, far
beyond constructions sites and mud and rock hills
bulldozed and ready for new roads out of town.
Out by the shire farms where the trees still stood wild
And a bull watched the file of boys tramping through
Its grasses. There the house with its dark gamekeeper
and his dogs, so long ago, a fairy tale.

The trees, those ancient oaks we spike to climb
when early autumn gave its sign the nuts were ripe.
Old gaffer and his dogs just couldn't grasp why we
would risk to climb the oaks, to join the birds
And squirrels in their nest. He'd scratch his head and
hang his bent pipe in his jaw and keep the dogs at bay.
The pipes and the sheer beauty of filching golden acorns.

At home I'd raid the trays about the house
for longish ends, even stole the odd one or two,
Senior Service navy cut or
Players with the Jack Tar pictured on the packet.
They smelled so sweet before the smoking
and the came the choking horror of the smoke.
Hard to get used to.
But there was nothing,
nothing sweeter than the comraderie
of two or three bosom pals
with stolen tobacco having a choke,
pretending to smoke,
cupping the lit end in the palm
or flailing the hand sideways from the lips,
pretending to savor the smoke in the lungs,
in their throats, through their noses,
casually releasing it in streams
As we had seen our brothers,
our parents blowing plumes
into the foggy blue air.
How important to start young.
To start the silent drawing of breath
in acknowledged secret,
Forbidden togetherness in which
talk was all you had, big talk,
things that needed to be said together
while the air was thick with unclean breath
and the face changed to its new mask
and stopped the clock.

David Gilmour