As all the pictures
                  speed past;
                  a monochrome classic,

like a flash ***** of stale
                 groups at stage,
                 a round of prospective lookers

as I keyhole in my car, outside
                 this story-telling,
                 all these holes in cloth.

I am aside all this business,
                 all this light snap,
                 the train now lost
                 in the purpose of direction.

The strandcafe
                   was lined
                   with Hitchcock seagulls

as you looked over
                   your glasses
                   with concern
                   and said

that I did not understand Hegel.

A time ago of rage, and joy and rain.

So when the moon
                draws the tide
                you crawl into yourself,

your eyes close like
               a wet umbrella,
               the tension in your face

slacks, the wind cools;
              your breath flows
              steady under the sea;

the stars slip into the dark, the waves

Gather the crowberries for the windfeast.

Adorning our cheeks with ochre
                       we gather together
                       a throne of old rowan.

The staggards behind us ;
                       warm breath at our napes.
                       We are as careful as a circle.

So a keening for the wild flightsman,
                       the hewer of stone, blood-iron hearted,
                       now dead as a distant star
                       that points the way of smoke, of fire.

But for a moment the wind resides.

The wind smells of
frozen milk and carbolic,
this is the edge of December;

a slopping out of leaves
and burnt wood, the overspew
of ovens that keeps

us holding out coats at the throat.
The winter is still out,
we wait for the last bus of snow.

An apple split
by my own thumbs,
a removal man.

You are an ebb
distant, a rustle of waves,
an upflight of birds,
migrant in ice.

When you cross the road
to your car, twenty years
and more fall from me,
this is a closure in dull light.
Winter's tale.

When the night
                 rubs out the horizon
                 and all this black
                 has more the quality of shade

and all the copsed trees
                cluster round sleeping fields
                and buried life waits and looks,

a door in a heap of lived-in-stones opens
               neon turns the cowshed
               into some kind of church.

This is the drained time,
              the false dawn
              that makes the morning man start.