the nurseling inn

Water dripped from an overhang in a leaf-strewn brook. It was not altogether dark,
once you got used to it.


The brown shadow of a bird flitted among the boulders,


the brook in its eye.



Nothing was heard but the thin sweet song.

It was an inn of dreams; flock roosting in bevelled cruck,  chalk castigation.
The far light of its windows (rose and amber)
widened along the box-alleys.
A wagon pointed its forks at the sky;
a dog slouched into the yard.
Otherwise the inn floated like unwelcoming silence,
serene in its woods. Of some flowers of China.
Daimlers lined up on the gravel. And what lies beneath the inn
and its network of underground tunnels in dry yellow clay,
but hard and darkening rock? Miles of descent, in which
there were sometimes a distant spate of tremors,
a ticking, a sigh from that restless jelly of heat, the core?

There came a long sigh of boughs, passing like a hand reaching
across the wold, and then another, so to the lonely traveller's fancy
grew the idea that the trees
were shifting ground, and that the trees were crowding in. 

I shook my ears of their sleep and gathered my knapsack,
which was bleached to a jade colour; there were ginger nuts within!
I more slid than walked on the leaf-fall, descending to the sea-cliff.
Above my head a constellation -- I knew its name then, though I don't now ---
bobbed among the the branches, who seemed to be grasping for it.

I was at the notch and stood over the beach in grey moonlight.
The gulls were quieting, and waves barely lifted the pebbles.
The stilling of the dark planet's nowness to this inn-struck moon.
I delighted in my death.



There was someone else moving around in the wood; there came
the stealthy sound of someone moving forward in the silence, alarmed by
their own noise,  and often pausing, but determined.
Was that nothing to do with me?
Was that something to do with me?
The feeling that they knew me, I knew them, were known to me, was known to them,
as if it was a gear-change
sung to the different colours in the harmony leaves
sung to the velveteen marker in the lemony room
snug of the snakeskin waters black with the eyes of lapis
came before me with , no, not a panic,
but a shallower breathing, an anxiety of listening to the dry leaf's ripple under my own boot.
Boldly marched they in Bratislava...


Who measured all their pouring blood?


lovely is walking in the woods and groves


And