Larks and herons rise from the same shared ground –
a salt-marsh sprinkled with scurvy grass
like early snow. A navigable channel
is impossibly distant, far-off as
childhood’s spring tides. Silt obscured endeavour.
Sailors and milkmaids and priests lie low
as the worked-out coal seams. Glaciers made this –
ice miles, thick as centuries, combing valleys,
teasing out hills, a slow explosion
of seas. I imagine, back in Europe’s
reticular forests, a homely,
mackerel sky caught in another’s vision –
ancient weathers, sand settling in a pool,
pebbles jarred momentarily, the shape
and sense of time.
Towing the continent,
hulks sailed west. Only fulmars passed. The past
stretches like a landscape from this instant,
encompassing it. The oneness of things,
their disparateness I taste like blood:
the jest at the heart – being here and now
who could so easily have been elsewhere
or no one. Oblivious of ironies,
soarers and coasters cohabit. The ice
was deep as mountains. I am shrouded in
imagining’s ponderous white oceans.
By David Selzer
