A whiskered mask was all I saw
in the milkers’ twilight hour
of the glimmery ghost of Fortinbras
not in Denmark, but here.
Wings creaked, deep before daybreak
and flapped, bird-necks astretch,
out beyond sight in the ghoul-light
(straw-smell, wet armour-brass).
The whiskery glint was gone.
Nobody passed by the smoking glass
of the lost lake either, that morn.
Where he had gone, whom he had seen,
indeed what he might have wanted,
invisibly wired the hours between
wharf and the usual noon canteen,
but it made both disjointed.
As the day wears on, those shinbone greaves
and that bale-bright glaring no-one believes,
nor the milkwarm farm he haunted.