Lovely tenderness in the line Dave. The echo in the garden triggered a thought of Eliot’s Burnt Norton. As usual, I appreciate your venture with words, though at this stage have not drawn out any overall meaning. Will ponder… The figure eight had me picturing the sign for infinity. The Eliot reference also made me think of how we experience time. A sense of being in timelessness or time not netted by the maths of the clock. The bundling of past/present/future. Love the doodling close and that earlier notion of ‘flowering’ rain. In general, I got a melancholic mood with the clouds and insistence of gulls, the stillness before a thunderous downpour, the idling on a blank page. Of course, the measure of eight could have a personal significance, including a signifier of childhood /relationship years.
I like how this ends too, it fits the mood of the rest of the poem. For me there were adjectives that seemed to be trying to overachieve a visual, like bulbous rain , stillest flutter, flowers blackly. Not to say don’t use them but for a reader like me I can’t make a mental picture of what they mean and it stops me to reread and that breaks the mood of the poem. But the ending, spot on.
Thanks Tom, excellent comments and well worth playing around with. And your perceptive cuts too David. Plenty to consider. Exactly what I was looking for