I had to close my eyes
as I came downhill.
I didn’t bring anything with me.
Sheep went circling,
lambs tumbled over a wall.
Their seaward faces,
small mouths opening.
I had tree-sounds,
I was a salamander, a grey cloud.
What happened to me then,
when hillsides poured, the tree trunks opened?
The alphabet was lifting,
letting our thoughts open and pass through:
wind through an orchard,
or lambs above, on a green headland.
When we stepped across a threshold
they were lying on straw
in the corner, like heaped-up rags.
Just born, and they began to sing.
Lambs wandered up and down the roads
like music. They stepped across hillsides
under a fern-wall, looked inside a hedge.
Talking to each other,
keeping in touch with the ewes on the hill.
Last night I awoke.
I was finding a tree trunk
to sleep inside. Bark of the willow,
the pin oak, the sycamore.
I was looking for lost tree bark.
First the tough integument,
then a closer, inside bark
like the skin of an almond.
The alphabet was shrinking,
earth was shrinking away from us.
I had to sink way down,
remember the contours of each note.
Feeling my way along ditch banks and rivers.
I was keeping in touch
with zero, like the lambs.
I had trusted them with my grief,
and they spoke to me:
through the inside walls of childhood
and above, on a green headland.