Sleepless I opened the slats of the bathroom’s

white Venetian blind expecting darkness

but the eastern sky over our neighbours’ roofs

was already pale, and the Morning Star glowed

gilded, and I suddenly remembered

being in the yard of an old coaching inn,

standing by a sandstone horse trough still used

for hunts, its water frozen so deeply

I could only crack the surface with my fist.

Behind the inn farmland – ploughed, hoar frosted,

horse trampled – stretched unfenced over a rise.

Disconnected shames and regrets, that restless,

anxious night, had jerked through my synapses

like shunted railway wagons. Seeing the star,

watching the day becoming lucent,

I wondered how the memory of

something so seemingly innocent,

and so soon over, should have lasted

and returned unprompted like some sort of

revelation: remembering the ice

in the trough, and, stretching out of sight,

those ridden, roughshod fields.