THE AUTUMN SWOLLEN
And, behold, there came up out of the river seven
well favoured kine and fatfleshed; and they fed
in a meadow.
(Genesis Chap. 41, v.2)
The streams have quietly overflowed their banks,
along which rushes and scrub and moss-grown trunks stand in water,
new-born firs compete with each other at taking swimstrokes.
Winter-sown fields lie like elongated lakes that are not sucked up,
but mirror the sky with jet-fighter traces, parallel-ejaculated streaks
sign the sky where it crashes into the two planes.
Motionless in their winter coats a herd of red-brown heifers has just got up,
where the black mud meets the wet green,
in long puffs the steaming breath of the cattle pushes into the cold air.
Further south if has rained continually for weeks, rivers throb and grow,
break dikes like pain chasing through a body, submerge town and countryside,
hide streets and cars in the streets, carries carcasses of animals.
Water pours into gardens, forces its way past barricaded doors and windows,
causes the odd house to collapse or rushes into cellars, rises several floors,
people use boats in the streets, row from house to house, transport hundreds
of dead bodies.
I wade across the ploughed fields, up the hill, my feet
slip in the clayey soil, trip on furrows as I proceed;
the tree at the crest flies up to fetch birds down from the sky.
A colony of rooks lands on the bare branches, crooked as fingers
that for years have studied Haydn’s unpredictabilities,
with prolonged cries the birds pull a cloth right down across the earth.
They drag a death-cloak of darkness behind them, but the sky will be lit
a while yet and the clouds before then take on a bloodied pink primeval tinge,
the white fighter-streaks change to steely grey before they dissolve.
The sky opens deep in copper fire, in turquoise, in bright shades of blue,
a space of continued amazement for the dilated eye, a ravine
to disappear in without a sound above the soggy earth.
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