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Drystone In sooty streams across the hill, rough, bumpy, contoured in jagging falls and twists, they walk beyond the crest, beyond the muddy clough, children’s coarse pencil sentences, deep-scored, staggering across a thick absorbing sheet, dry frontiers on a wet land, dry streams across wet earth, coal-dry, soot-dry, carrying the wind’s black leavings from the mill valley, but against the gales low, subtle, huddling: needs more than wind to scatter them. There is no glue, there is no mortar, subtle, solid enough for here: only the stained air blowing up from the brewery through the lean dry gaps; hard to know how an eye once saw the consonance, the fit of these unsocial shapes, once saw each one pressed to the other’s frontier, every one inside the other’s edge, and conjured the dry aliens to run, one sentence scrawled across the sheet, subtle against the wind, a silent spell, a plot. 14
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Six O’Clock As the bird rides up the sky, the last sun looking up gilds in the hollows of the wings, an afterthought of gift to guests ignored and hurt, but no, the bird rides up the sky, eyes on the night. When the sun levels its sights across the grass, it packs the blades and little animals so tight, so heavy that you wonder why they don’t tumble over into their new, uncompromising shadow, into their inner dark. 15

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Drystone

In sooty streams across the hill, rough, bumpy, contoured in jagging falls and twists, they walk beyond the crest, beyond the muddy clough, children’s coarse pencil sentences, deep-scored, staggering across a thick absorbing sheet, dry frontiers on a wet land, dry streams across wet earth, coal-dry, soot-dry, carrying the wind’s black leavings from the mill valley, but against the gales low, subtle, huddling: needs more than wind to scatter them. There is no glue, there is no mortar, subtle, solid enough for here: only the stained air blowing up from the brewery through the lean dry gaps; hard to know how an eye once saw the consonance, the fit of these unsocial shapes, once saw each one pressed to the other’s frontier, every one inside the other’s edge, and conjured the dry aliens to run, one sentence scrawled across the sheet, subtle against the wind, a silent spell, a plot.

14

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