Terrain

 

Your eyes can pour fields, crowds of sparrows
clattering and turning out of the hedges.
Your marsh can spread behind bedroom doors,
populous with wings, stamens, antennae,
anthers in pools of blooms. I will inhale
all the pollen. Forestier of buttocked hills,
nights of you are musked with animal treads.
Sometimes a deer looks in from the road.
Sometimes a bee rests its flight on the centre
of your tongue. Though I daren’t risk slow-moving
rivers, in leaf-lipped ponds I go adrift,
unfeathered but warm enough in the beams
of cloudlight spread across the rolling
weather of your face. Don’t close your eyes, not yet.

 

 

See also Cezanne on the Pennine Way