At Badgers Mount

1

The images that others have of us
sustain and kill. When I left one gallery
twenty years long and found a flaking
caravan flimsy under tapping apple-boughs,
they paused at the broken gate, the walkers,
and coloured my desolation with their eyes -
a bronzed romantic in his peace-camp,
dropped-out and speculative.
Did he feel substantial, too, and wholesome,
the landowner, to see me picturing him
richly hauling a winter's heat from woods
in silvered lengths? And his wife, brooding
earth-motherly over vegetables in the kitchen?
But for all comes night, and its gallery of mirrors.

2

Hugging the existence of the last voice
on the emptying wavebands, I survey the dozen
...