Fen
Rising unsleeping at five
I go down, full of the dream
that woke me, carrying
memory of it down to the garden
which slopes to the fen’s altering light.
Tips of leaves,
gables, grass-blades, snail
unreeling its path along the fence-post:
awareness of the morning softens
the edge of remembering.
Across the fen and higher,
the mist that holds and barely
holds sun and moon together,
the damp light dissolving
perspectives: an illusion,
behind it, of massed land rising.
Martins scoop and turn
about the house-corners,
beyond and behind me, unpicking
the dream I’d brought.
Fruits under the nets,
toys abandoned on the path:
all still except the birds turning.
Drops of dark strung across fields
could be men bound
somehow by the mist but that
I know them to be trees:
as I know that the mist, finally,
will yield a horizon
as low as my brow stooped
to meet it, as dream falls
away, that would have given me
you, perhaps. And now this returned
land, hard to walk:
clay, and water.