A Stand

How old are those tall pines that stand with a leaning grace
at the edge of the housing estate? 

And at the edge of this image, as with so many others, is a boy being relatively patient in a Yaris parked near a bus stop, on the way home from his after-school (about half a mile away). Last stop was the secret park, where I walked my stilted evening shadow over the field and threw a few balls for Lola while he surveyed, as he did yesterday, his own private estate: the permanently fir-tree-branch-roofed bank of the stream, pleasingly like a kind of underground burrow.