The wind, tonight, like the roar of the waves

The wind, tonight, like the roar of the waves, the

waves white-capped by the moon. The creak of the

pines, their sway as if in a dream of

limbering up their roots and timbering

ships: as if they dream, to a tree, of

wanting to fall, that clasp of brackish

water about their curving forms, the

viscous slip together of their own sticky

saps with blackening pitch. But the ragged

canyon below is only tricklingly

streamed, and the valley beyond has long since

watched, in the light of countless rising

suns, its steaming waters recede, in-

deed forgotten the march, as if in

search of the suns' last place of sleep, of

staunch and prizing glaciers. The rocks sink

low to the hill and ballast the creaking

trees. The wind drops brown and verdant

needles on mosses of impossibly soft sea-

green, a soft and unmoving sea-foam. These

colors, tonight, like the white just edging the

darkening craters of the moon: this windswept

life like nothing so much as the light on the

airless surface of the moon.

(Begun 18 January 2012, edited 24 January 2012, "in the kind of chill that the working brain / foolishly thinks it can evade by keeping still." I tried to evoke the sort of sense-perceptual experience of a place that, repeated over years, becomes infused with the feeling of time passing: the particular experience of the place seeming to capture both the surprise and the familiarity of 'it all'. With shades, probably, of some of the 20th- and 21st-century British fiction I read over the winter.)