A muttering grey sky
shallow hopeless canopy
Rolled down right to its whitened
Rim around the horizon
where the low
Black hills of nightmare start that stretch
To the world’s own lip maybe
Here round-limbed long-haired
women inhabit only
With horses and slow cattle
The staring green-gold pastures
among ponds
That glimmer under the winds as they
Feel their way in from the west
And the boy just born
sprawling ruddy and fatherless
On the menacing grass where he falls
Laughs out loud as the sky though slime
still hears him
And out of him the cord still glistens
Tangled cerulean-silver