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.)
