Light springs and nudges an earlier margin onto the water’s landing.

The fall’s stone sounds a calmer note in the milden lime,

the old seabed giving way, shell by shale to flow,

granular fishbones cushioning this morning’s take on water.

These last days struck like glass steel in a 24/7 iron freeze.

So, I recoiled into her banks, I took a place in the damp

familiars, to wait again, a speck on the Atlantic lens,

for the swell of a seventh wave to loose me.

I empty the leaving boat and push it downstream.

The land lets in and I am at once stone settled,

up to my ears in it, mycelia to neuro stem, branch

locked overed branch, feeling the rips in the tide skin

opening to currents running elsewhere.

Something like you begins here, as a spring, running

from a pipe, buried through a drystone, brimming

a half-circle cow trough laid into the wall. Overspilt

in limestone silt, moss grown deep, haired with long grass,

you’re a last mammoth, leaning into an era’s end.

Or what I see when I listen to some cellular reverb plying atomic time.

Or random memory. Or a limestone trough, with this man stood in front,

hearing a quiet corner of the Dryhill field, under the Havens’ house.

The moss wrings itself out and you well in hoof-prints,

smoothing them down and begin your fall again. You let slip

under the elder hedge, hop down a half dozen faezy pools,

as wide as hands pushed into the bank. You are only water now,

a membrane wetting the boot-smooth, ragstone path,

before a switch back, down a sheep drove track and disappearance

into your sound’s pooling. You go through the houses’ clearcut,

under elder nettle briar, the air full of flight, bees

on the bramble flower and a pair of Cryptic Wood Whites,

who flit out and over the old man’s beard like eloping brides.

Meadow browns hang down on blood-green dock leaves until it stops.

The wood appears, the light drops and you reveal yourself,

a full twelve strides wide, as a roll-stone rattlebed of ovalled fists.

I wait on the edge of you, for time, in the ash scrub,

where each stem, ivy-clamped in varicose jackets, hangs

heavy with fallaway vine. I listen for your leak-trickle

through barbed wire, into sound in the next clearing.

The bramble push-over waves, crest astral,

blackberry milk-pink flowers, docking with the hive.

From under them, a bedrock surfaces, like a whale’s head,

its skull ridge heavy, stepped downhill in your song’s mirror.

Stream as sound, sound as briar wave, as stone sound,

your polyphony falling faster, louder now, plummetting

the lumpen shelves, like a hurried explanation and making

for the relief of the meadow’s slowing. I clamber into you here,

head for a home in your leaps, where the human path

crosses your stones, scattered and dam-strewn,

turned and turned again in re-arrangement.

From here, where the people start, I look back to your pipe’s dream,

pushing through the drystone, as some anonymous begin-again,

from early rains to slow returns. I’ll call you Haven’s Brook,

and keep to following your way home;

Haven’s to Lime to Frome to Severn,

home to begin again,

Haven’s to Lime to Frome.

We looked down mostly stroking techno pets sometimes raising heads from a stoop that had our necks aching for corporeal stars. We sang rehashed anthems of distant victories, confused sacrifice incapable as we were of conceiving in a line true to its causes. We didn’t know what the clouds were singing or that the trees were waiting for us to catch up. We saged with that pre-requisite confidence concerning luminary liminals at which we grasped assuring ourselves of a generous profundity in the above.

All around us the encompassing nature of nature gave a peaceable stillness to our deaf recognitions and it continued unremittingly like music behind a wall or a door or a party in a garden a few streets away. We continued the teasing out of a random speck of DNA like cooled ash falling far enough from the fire onto our skin reminding us of our residue and that that might even save us. What was gone? What might return in passing? We were transients making shelter with a constant grief knowing that we’d forgotten. We examined the cartography like illiterates pretending to read the newspaper most of it lost besides the pictures.