A Kind of Bright Darkness

A Kind of Bright Darkness

 

There is a stile still standing in the ghost

of a hedge, and a broken gate beside it, opening

on the pathless nowhere of a ploughed field.

 

I don't walk there; nor do I retrace my steps

down the route I did not take to get here.

Cuckoos are silent, so next time, I must be

 

gone. The nearer ground has lapsed to shadow;

the middle distance echoes with a kind of bright

darkness, as though the slow alchemy of sun

 

and soil has not made gold, but crumbling crusts

of verdigris. The sky is strewn, as at an augury,

with molten copper: to scry it is to go blind.

 

This aching transmutation of light into a sightless

knowing is all that I can give you: my hands and feet

have vanished. No one walks. The landscape is in flux.

 

Poem by Giles Watson, 2013. Folklore insists that if you hear the song of the cuckoo, you will be in the same place again next year. The title is a quotation from the shortest and best review my poems have received: "He has a wonderful sensibility for the layered British landscape and for a kind of bright darkness", by Vahni Capildeo.

Done