All this elaborate disguise.
No one’s here
anywhere under Orion
and the new moon’s cup of rain.
Light divided over the moor
in the fields of the bronze makers:
sheep, bracken, ponies,
stoney rainsodden furniture.
With a stone to break you.
With a stick’s point
rammed through the ribs. Then came
farmers and hunters, scraping for tin,
setting stones it’s a warning to cross still.
Back when the moon was the pale
banished wife of the sun
in the lost tale of the arrowmaker’s vision.
All their tools, bones,
legends and gods are one wash
through the peat now.
Scoffed down a bird’s share
of porridge and bilberry. Snarled
among scrawny cattle,
dogs and their stink
trailing after. Then gone to the city
whose names mean water, a people
calling themselves people of this land.
Among grey rocks
I took her, her eye
glimpsing a half county
stopped at the ocean: blue sheen,
two boats in the ancient distance
where she is the sea and she dances.