On the back of  a bus-ticket I find

this picture   coded,  multidimensional

a microchip of Time, trapped, untapped.

 

I am standing in a lane

on the top of a red, hummocked hill,

my lungs full of tatters of salt and sky;

I am looking for the sea  -  but I cannot find it!

a place where Larks toss in the skirly air

and Tits twitter in the Ragged Robin and Holly:

snails trapse silver trails across the sopping bracken

and Primroses, anademed with moonstones

unfurl in the secret Ivy and root-woven banks.

 

Squalls run across the land, wet and wild with animation

blotting the horizon, blurring the sentinel Cedars and Pines;

a  crowd of sea-born creatures, headlong tumbling

with a scatter of Gull and Rook that wheel and tilt

tangled in their flying hair.

 

Suddenly, as all graces are, a long sliver of pure, white sun

strikes the ends of my eye and there!   sheer and numinous

a chalice of beaten, arcane silver,  lies the eldritch sea!

the sea I had been searching for

through the lanes and sheep-blobbed fields.

When all I’d found were vistas of wind and cloud

in which the humped Devonian hills

frolic and caper like herds of humorous, naughty ponies

confusing my Directions and concealing the sea.

 

Luminous and unwarranted

on the shaft of that undyed glory

it reveals itself, unfettered, eclectic

so for a timeless moment I am molten, riven

from this into That.

 

 

May 1983