Flattening into the bank
as his lord rides by: not a man,
but a root of the elm
grown round stones.
In the field carrying straw
or straggling home beneath sticks
in failed light
two legs and a burden.
Lives in smoke, picks wheat
from the grainpit cracks,
limps through the frozen ploughland
turning an acre a day.
Dreams in flashes: rabbit
snared in the waste filched home
in his jacket, pheasant’s
stuttering blur whose eggs he sucks clean.
And the boy he was with the oxgoad
tramped through the watermeads, first light
finding him still in that field
bent and ailing.
Water lifts off the land.
We are dancing.
We are not dancing.
He is a man, he is waving,
a speck in the falcon’s round vision
that pins him dreaming
his master’s cut throat,
the beating of ploughshares.