On a different road

I took a drive today, without my camera! Grr. I was going to assess a pupil and I have to tell you I was really excited to learn where he lived, because of the road there! I'm not even sure that photographs would capture it for you anyway, so I've taken the liberty (and possibly leave of my senses) to write you a poem about it instead:

On a different road

On a different road, today,
The High Road, the Top Road, she called it.

The memory of an earlier journey:
A landscape that dropped away from the car towards a jewel-bright reservoir and then reared up again into tumbling hills.
Gates.
A chateau.
Houses, old and new, perched high on the ridge on my right, to drink in the view.

I wanted to take that road again.

Anticipation, knowing the view is coming,
as I drive along the High Road, the Top Road.
Something has already changed – here the trees are thicker, the colours older and richer.

The view is coming.

Past the hedge and the landscape drops. The reservoir is an azure-green patch in the hills.
The fields are hazy with grey-blue stalks of straw, remains of the harvest.
The sky is another stroke of grey-blue.
If an artist painted it, she’d have to dilute inks until they were homeopathic drops in the water.
If an artist painted it I wouldn’t believe her – ‘too wish-washy,’ I’d say.
But I’d be wrong.
Here, on a different road, everything is hazy,
Everything is watered, everything is intense.

Back on my own road, the colours return to their normal strength.
The soil is a strong red-brown, the sky is cerulean blue.
But I turn and, there, on the horizon, just a streak of hazy grey-blue.