i. grasmere

First night here – spring snow flurries

I sate a long time

hail then rain, the lake

slate-black, blown in cups and wavelets

walked among the stones of the shore

the line of the mountains merging

with the last branch of light from the north

– water-light, scarlet-lit, peachy-gold –

until my heart was easier

and later

over Silver How

a clouded moon.

*

I dream Coleridge's dream –

black-haired woman, wild-faced, waking me

into a moon-flooded room

a very fine moonlight night, the moon shone

is it you, Dorothy?

dream a boat tethered at the water's edge

wash away dirt

to the under-gleam

like herrings in the water

a fish's silver scales

*

next morning on the path to Rydal

a heron fishing, a red squirrel

on the path a blind man

a woman begging

a little girl

now as then the lake

an image of stillness, clear as glass

in the hill's dips and crevices snow like lost silver

pebbles on the road glittered like silver

frostings among the stones of the wall

*

at sunset red lights behind Langdales

these hard times

these hard times

a terrible kind of threatening brightness

ii. migraine

you try and out-walk it, walk all day pushing on, pushing on as if you can outstep the kamikaze men shimmying hand over hand down the fine internal rope ladder of your skull, the rain a percussive te-dum-te-dum on your neck, your scalp, and like a fisherman slowly reeling in his catch hooked in the sole of your foot, drawn through thigh, lumbar, the sparse cobbles of your spine where the cord tightens; you cannot stop it, you cannot; give in and allow the pain dominion of the vessels of your brain, blood swollen with blood, a leech fattening, the fat pulse in your crown where once the plates were soft and open; if only they would un-fuse now and let the creature out, the dirty brown water run

iii. loughrigg

I sit against the moss-legged hawthorn

and watch the vale unfold

a painted cloth

I lay upon the steep

sun on the lake a blanket

of crushed diamonds, the water

spotted with sparkles