It is July and it is Sunday.
A dark, restless Sunday.
Morning hangs like incense: suspended on the kestrel's wooden wings.
Lucidity is but an inky tumult blotting the night's waning stars:
disparate, faceless grey among a growing blackness.
The smoke of a short-lived fire.
The wind hastens. The arms of a birch fold and the church's vane rotates.
The theatre! The anticipation.
The muteness of the rain on a distant field.
Approaching the red-brick house that burns with darkening rooms:
streaks of silver gilding the margin of it's cloaked black eyes.
A hammer falls on this great, wide anvil:
scales of iron scatter and resonate in the upper atmosphere.
I cannot bear to look.
Not far to the left, at the terminal of a tunnel of some fluted grey fabric,
white plumes rise and expand and shadow at the edges.
I walk toward them, over the ghost of an old rain, to a familiar garden:
heather and clover proliferate in it's borders - they are to be hoed constantly.
Hedges of yew and box are to be stripped of the green coats
spring afforded them, tailored to my will and at my expense.
I fight life and nature equally. Forming a transient perfection here.
Perfection soon to be enveloped by the lavender and the stocks,
then themselves by the bind-weed that has taken to their blooms and stems,
to my very roots. All is sustained by this rain, this depressive dampness.