Rotten Row, Hambleden 15/12/18

Nearby, or assembled: the last allegory.

It is cold as habituated sky.

The sky is now a habit.

Day is worn with empty sockets.

It is miraculously massive in stone.

It is a monolith: grey as still.

It is absolute.

 

Clouds are statues.

The earth is a fist of mud.

Cows byre in straw hooves.

Cold is a secret. Memory is cold.

 

Secrecy is a king and a pauper stunned by humanity.

They stand �" antlers on the stock land.

They are still as horizons.

They peck the eyes out of clocks.

Time would embalm them, but it is too cold.

Soup might warm them, but it is dust in a bowl.

Cheer might cheek them by the common fire

But the hearth is pale.

 

They swear by Socrates.

 

Who would herd the swine?

Who should drive the truth from the land

And send it into hay-steam?

 

‘The only kingdom is the self,’ a beak

Crackles on its way to crow.

 

The sky is a permanent avalanche.

Black puddles remember cow-weight.

Breath dances on the edge with certain steam.

The king is heavy. The pauper is.

The animal is heavy. The divine wet prolapse

Of its interior is pleasantly unknown.

Nothing is knowable.

 

Patience has been frozen into perfection.

The land waits. We walk on.