Lives ago, years past generations
perhaps nowhere I dreamed it:
the foggy ploughland of wind
and hoofprints, my father
off in the mist topping beats.
Where I was eight, I knew nothing,
the world a cold winter light
on half a dozen fields, then
all the winking blether of stars.
Before like a fool I began
explaining the key in its lost locked box
adding words to the words to the sum
Where I was
distracted again by the lapwing,
the damp morning air of my father’s
gregarious plainchant cursing
all that his masters deserved
and had paid for.
Sure I was
then for the world’s mere being
in the white rime on weeds
among the wet hawthorn berries
at the field’s edge darkened by frost,
and none of these damned words to say it.
I began trailing out there in voices,
friends, women, my children,
my father’s tetherless anger, some
like him who are dead who are
part of the rain now.