Weather | some small corner

We go out late, drawn on by the promise of light.

A farm’s edge: we stand transfixed by the pale blaze of evening, the rolling land, the caged thunder of pigs; skylarks hang in the middle air, dancing, dancing above the stiffened spires of green wheat. We climb a hill, hands brushing chamomile, brushing the new flush of borage. At crest, we watch the wind press the barley; a bristling song of inconceivable patterns. A hare, massive in its hind quarters, quivers, plays, circling beneath the squat bulk of a grain silo. I catch you in the corner of my eye, rippling in your skin, alive in the growing arc of your consciousness.

We crouch in a lane of wet shadows, tracking the wheezing hum of yellowhammer song. We pull ourselves along, reeling them in. There: crisscrossing, conflagrant in the choirs of an ash crown.

The day closes, the solstice sun at the cease of its long, long falling. Trees gather in half-night. We strain against silence, hoping for owls. As we break for home, a deer coughs breathsmoke at the soaring moon.

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up –
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons

Ted Hughes