Terrible and tall are the trunks in their ranks,
and reeling en masse
Like a timber-toothed maw guarding secrets

Where in that darkness do the rushing leaves go?
At my feet and in song!
With each bluster they usher the bedlam along

For what do they long?
For what within that writhing wood might turn them so headlong?

In little leaps and sudden swerves, they trace the winds across the turf
Such a dance on the Earth!
Such a rapturous throng!
Towards that crooked forest where my heart is darkly drawn

The frost-feathered birches are a heavenly white,
knuckled and rigid as elderly spines,
Holy as naves and as filled with esteem
November announces my season of dreams

Long nights south to the tree and the lake
For happiness sake, and lying with stars
The comforting sounds of a million cars
Rubber on tar, rubber on tar

Flights of romance and my supper outside
A tangle of shadows fiercely flailing at my sides,
and over tables of oak
I am sat near silent others in their scarves and winter coats

They accompany me so, although none by invite
We are strangers breaking bread beneath a milky way of lights

Here where lofty leagues above, the storm begins to croon
Where fleecy clouds in motion seem to overtake the moon

Here in the dusk while the light falls away,
comes the night in it's wake
I am wrapped in the nothings of a wintery gale

At my neck and my ear rush it's wintery song
I am coldly embraced, although never for long

Here where the roads harbour hardly a soul
Where the bramble and the briars are frozen and blown
Here where the rains move in curtains of silk-
curtains of light, beating and beating at the edges of night

Here where the pines in their thrashing and throes
In their fits and their starts and their sea-sounding odes..
..they are after my heart, they are leaning and thrown
beneath arctic white stars

Tall and shadowed is the man from behind
We'd follow the prints of his footsteps in kind

Through bramble and briar to our chest, to his knees
The brown and suede boots we would follow under trees

Guitar bags and candles and his things around the house
Strange metal trinkets which made strange metal sounds

The kisses with my mother before they never kissed again
And his father too,
whom I met in the street and awkwardly embraced
Love comes in lulls and in spates

Before the night comes cold and proper
When set against a fiery sky
The crooked limbs of a naked poplar
Have stirred a romance in my mind

And swaying with their kin and kind
My heavy heart asway in kind
Those wooden spines so hale and hearty
Like will-'o-wisps they'll soon depart me

The oversized doors made from panels of oak
From somewhere behind open heavy and slow,
for another akin
The creak of the wood as they let themselves in

Disturbing the hallowed and candlelit quiet
Turning the heads of the practicing pious
We are shook from a dream
By the rushing of wind through this place of esteem

Above the silhouettes of pines,
with needled edges blown and wild
Heroes collide!
Virgins and damsels are frozen in stride
Together by inches they turn in the sky

And brilliant the moon in her loftiest place
Diana's face aloft in space - and under her eye,
mahogany tables set out in the night,
wearing her light

Draped in her rays are the myriad faces,
Strangers in pairs and amid conversations
In gestures and signs and in whispers and mimes
Their stories take flight - I'm enthralled by their
tales uttered into the night

Here where the pines are as tall as the sky
Where the moon will forget all our faces
If I had their ear or if I had their graces
I would share in their solemn and secretive phrases