Between
Oranged nights, ghost washes from the edge
of station drop-offs, culs-de-sac near schools
and concert halls aswirl in silence or a distant
clangour of drunks, are live with ticking dread,
as dark morning connections for student coaches
were live, travelling home with too many bags,
these late-night rendezvouses with dependents,
the timetables ever-erratic with others in motion.
We’re thinned to linen, breezes tremble our repose,
the moments brush upon us, vibrate our breath
to highest alert, and we stare, eyes a-bulge
with calculus acuity, never more alive than when
we are between, never more ado than waiting.
Langdale Pikes
My mouth clags full of effort’s oxide gob over
clefts, scree, huge but smoothed-out boulder folds. Then
I shamble in a raised-up vast. Ahead, a chilly fen
of mountain breath hovers, dishwash colour
under dishwash skies. No settlements. I trail your
precise diagonal on the fell. Soon I’m tense:
sky’s thought-quelling and thought-propagating bigness
beats harder than wind, tears off lendings, awes
calculation, ordinance. Babble teems.
I stare around. It teemed within priests who took
annihilating starscapes for their Book,
bent true threats—wolves, men, want—into their theme
of doubt unbounded, named the shades of fear
to quell or lease with sacrifice. On
and on you tread, across these stones and Aeons.
You turn, recount the tale you told over beers
the night before, that rambler who imagines
each Karrimor step tramples his boss’s face.
Dressed in the latest gear, a practical grace
fits you, as natural as reindeer skins.
And there you are, hunter-gatherer, tracking through
the wild. I’d like to twist you in your self,
you scope of slightness, mote in space, mar your health
with rites of sickness, but on you go, immune.
Falling
Sky cups, pinches and flaps his face,
the grave ideas fly, collide
and fall through bigness, while the turbulence
of a constant Morse thrums on inside,
then drops too beneath his feet
in the leaf-crumble, cull broths, and dies
where all die for the folly of rebirth. But he
longs to fall upward, a ray
of silence into the sun, where this will cease.
* * *