A season of loose connections, bells
and weddings through the rainy summer.
I woke with my head in a crock,
I had dreamed of nothing.
I’m into town and out, down the hill
and up again, muttering waggontruss,
windbrace, through the tall woods
along the old pack road that no longer goes anywhere,
and like the windy leaves never still,
always on the way to some thought
lost in the traffic and the chatter,
the town below fading into voices off,
a hammer’s knock travelling beyond itself,
a man shouting his name over and over,
lives made from the sounds they make.
These things do not connect:
a yellow flower from a far off country,
linked hearts cut in a tree’s side,
sussura of pigeon wings, an animal threshing
the undergrowth, scribble of bird song
here, here, and your secret names for me –
Old Paint, Wild Root, Scissorbill. I dreamed
the ridge and these massed dark roots of the yews,
anger like a sudden wind. Wild root.