Now on its stone heaps the tussock is dry
stalks the colour of a scratch in glass and rattling fennel
tendrils from the root – Along the cutting’s side
speargrass with a rain wind in it moves through the shape
of a catching fire – At the level of my eye, its
close horizon, grasses moving many ways
like shivers, incandescent, each force forwards
through itself into the front of light, its
single instant the field falls through perpetually –
This grey light before rain in which years
I have forgotten invent a landscape still
in what I have named landscape – ruinable,
see-through, piece by piece drawn into that blank
in thought which sets the names in their array –
tussock, speargrass, wild fennel – bright charges
hung upon abyss – Do you remember?
In head-high grass, its pale seedheads, the wind is
massing light, lights moving in place and scattering down –
the grass untidy, touchable, steeply its slant
stalks narrowing back into their likeness –
where I am going in through leaf-clatter, corner branches
out to where, between the privet and the green palings,
a space is opening the way a fire is loosed
out of the dry branch into its own existence
and does not know me, walled in itself, its
dazzling blank – The road will come through here –

Lisa Gorton