Clearing

morning mist and cloud
faint on the mountain
a god is moving his face
over the waters a god
in the cleft in the pass up the
ghyll the scramblers make
their way also up –
yesterday     ||     in the beginning
they told a story about glaciers
& granite and later glass
and grottos and gone now
the volcanic surge coring
the apple the earth

you are finding a way by losing
the path and refinding
a path in what the other walkers
earlier said how had we never found
that tarn how
had we let the world dissolve
into the obvious life
we were living
despite        I saw the moon
and there you were Anne-Lise
in my mind        |        again last night
& the night before a new calendar
for memory or is it simply O
the daily        there’s the moon
& see that way
is south. It hung
half bitten over the fell the pike
the moon faint yet distinct
in the hot fresh blue.
I was rebuked by a shepherd
I was reading who hates the way I look
at his land        as if I could help it
and maybe with his help I can
maybe with his mental hand
we too would find
a new animal gear        new skilled
with fresh dumb hearts
that don’t need starving

I am going on again
but won’t apologise
as the day is fresh
& my spirit        my very spirit
rising in my chest like a metaphor
brought home to its source
far and high in the woods –
a clearing the Norse called thwaite