Driving through Small Towns in England

We spend our afternoon driving through small towns.

How dark it is during late December!

About three, we become aware of a heaviness

that encircles us. In vacant fields, the light wanes

and moves off, a tired animal. I remember

all this, remember unhappiness and loss,

as things that happened long ago,

before electrical towers appeared on the land,

before the lamps beside the road arrived,

even before the roads themselves. In the low,

cut stubble on a hill, birds drift and land,

rising above us, a silent storm. I survived

all that I could recall, even the slow death

of life, until now, this moment when the world approaches

too close, and threatens to become visible.

Still, we drive on, there is nothing else: a path

leading to some obscure village, the wind that catches

in our tires, the sheep, stolid and implausible.

We turn a corner. The landscape, too spacious and immense,

blinds us. Against the horizon, barns, thatched houses,

darkening clouds. There is an hour in our lives

when we waken to some intense

longing, some oppressive dread which loses

us in loneliness: has this happened? Dead leaves,

like quail flushed from hiding, rise up in a swirl.

Life blossoms around us: light mirrored on a pond,

light sweeping through a half-ploughed meadow, light

warming the windshield. The moon descends, dull as a pearl.

The widened road runs on, an open wound.