Big Dipper

Night! Between the houses a torchbeam processes, it is a waving
anemone's tooth. It briefly illuminates a polar star hawthorn garages
with the pyre of a summer insect. We had drawn up our feet steady
in the near to the ecliptic slatterns of a tree's attic;
we launched into night, ash-wings beat seedfully into the universal fog that
Kyle smoked dark lanterns damp graves as long as we did not talk
inched onto a shroud, the tartan of black colourways interwoven,
we potted, bent against the nap, on a "cloth of cold"
feet logged above corrugated slope, and twin gradient, triplet descent,
quarter fallow. Black rails, folds in the silent county,
distant flood-shadow, distant pitch, insistent whistle
that is owl, beer, otter and vole, all headed electro-sensitive
limb-contriving mouthers. The bang of a van door discolours minutely,
breaks forth like a shoulder where a colony of apetalous shadow-forms
creep into their mother's lull; a wave-crest, and this was also how
the ruled-in reminders, worries maybe longings,
flashed on our lines of thinking, regular knots under the weave,
head in black glass shattered; fixed in it; shattered; unbroken,
for the whole yard was in a mirror.

The cold like any big thing impedes a voyage into itself.
Our feet slip rimily, cursing; his, mine, a pause, mine, his...
then I know our feet are revolving it into a way of feeling
out each other's determination and of deterring it. Stop -
impedes a voyage into itself,
this is what its love is worth,
it does not concern itself with us, what it amounts to; this
at first is to freeze us out; freedom to give up the struggle,
freedom is that which is not given, thus freedom is given.
Low in the looping pastures I can smell its force,
conceive being ice-glad, being then
two sacs of colliding metal drawn from a shy brook
nothing but that, all my extremities ripped away
with the tackle of No. 2 Lifeboat, that black hulk
opening a black space, my fingers so still, so unfingered
that glass may have no envisaged surface and so no sheen,
be total, one solid coat the distillation of wind-chill.