Here is a fisherman without rod or net.
His shadow swims beneath the water
yet he is warm and asleep
in a faraway bed.
Moonlight washes lake waves.
Here is a breath, there is a breath.
He sees the breathing water.
His daughter, long drowned,
surfaces to kiss his forehead.
He turns in the snug bed
and smiles.
The dreaming fisherman
sinks deeper into the darkling depths.
Forms rise through the heads
of those who cannot sleep.
Bodies of light and dark
struggle in the fathomless.
He whimpers. tosses and turns.
Ghosts fetch up on a shelving shore,
reach for him, beg him to remember
how it was
before the lake woke up
and saw itself afloat
in a heron's eye.
up a steep and narrow road
reach the tops
wilderness reclaims a verge
of wintery snags
land juts and tilts
hauls out
lays treeless
clumps and hags
pitch up stricken soil
heap above the miry troughs
loud the heartbeat
nearer to feral thought
then any mouth or ear
swale and quag dawdle
appear to seep listless
no
every bog tunnels shrouded
to fetch up the feckless
harsh and gorsy
heather treading low
the moors mark nothing
only a head of gnashing wind
a whipping dinosaurs tail
blear and chill
bites and grapples
a stone-tusked marl
crofts under
tangles of un-spun fleece
in barb and thistle
sheep piss in running rivulets
thread through
mizzle-pecked rocks
inscribed
by whatever tortures the air
ravens picket grit edges
wings beating back the below
primal caws that lift and speak
for the standing stones
their harrowing
lime-cuffed history
before light founders deeper
black anvils appear
in the lowering
a scant anchoring
a bare farrowing
shorn and scoured aloft
by miles of orbiting
beauty
twenty years later
son sends pictures
of moors long traipsed
the sky in my phone howls
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