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.
By David Selzer