defoliants exist
dioxin for instance
denuding trees and
shrubs and destroying
people and animals

by spraying
fields and forests
we achieve fall and death
in the middle of the most
luxuriant summer;

this shifting of sorrow
this light-filled morning
was otherwise happily fair
but the grass is all gone
and a canopy’s spun
not of threads but of poisonous air
over forest and shore
over mouse over man

now the sky is a cavern
where withered birds
will rot like fallen fruit
where tractionless clouds
will atomise cities
and eddy them slyly in flight
like water through water
like sand through sand

even slugs with their slime-trails
are porous as mirrors
whose human reflections are lost
just the stalk of a nettle
explains leaflessly
that in our despair we have made
a flowerless earth
sexless as chlorine

see a morningpale star
gleams above like a brain
that is almost used up and burned out
too diffuse to recall
a man’s and a woman’s
union in their wingless flight
in a sweet-scented meadow
a summerwarm bed

see the clear waterfall
has congealed and grown small
on its way up the rock face again
and the fathomless roses
have hidden in bogs
indelible pollen laid by
for eternity
here they are copied fair in a script that is like
the script that the clouds in their drifting can write
or the script Archaeopteryx wrote into stone
across a dizzying sky-blue and clean
eternity
eternity

see the still becalmed wheat
in the haze and the heat
on its way down the rootstock again
while the poisonous winds
that paralyse blindly
move slowly and sullenly on
to eternity
never will death itself be the same any more
earthly death that all mortals must die as before
they are now counted down they are ticking away
while the earth crackles just as if it had frozen
for eternity
eternity

see the wonderful summer
the plums blue as doves
blown to particles feathering down
see the bindweed greywhite
as it crumbles and sinks
to the depths of the unmoulded clay
for eternity
there they are signed into the planless game
where none can tell whether a thing will remain
whether what’s raven or starling or lark
lost for all time will find itself there
in eternity
eternity

while the leaves of an elm tree
are swept down a street
and summer is greying with soot
I walk down the avenue
dark as when snow
one evening has frozen to blood
for eternity
here I slip in behind an old graveyard’s walls
where only the petrified doves go for walks
here they steal about in search of a place
where the stone heart informs them that peace settles down
for eternity
eternity