In fathoming the scarp and cwm
Long ocean berm,
Tight cove,
Cold spring
And cracked
Summer creek bed
The geographer
Reaps
Explanations
Slow and contingent,
Whole lives lived, sometimes,
Before they grandly set,
As stone, perhaps, or sand.
As a child I swam with purpose in my own
Landscape
Sublime.
It fed my dreams.
In Hampshire’s copper beechwood understory,
Descending fern-swathed island chines,
Racing the tide at Polzeath,
In tall August grass
Amid the skyscape
Of ancient Eggardon,
A king’s seat if there ever was,
Whole counties at my feet,
I marveled.
And then I went to school.
And ever since
Escarpments have betrayed their long upheavals,
Cols the diamond gouge of hard-packed ice,
Every beach the sifted upcast of its
Endless waves.
Even woods, I now see first as systems,
Vulnerable to change.
As the father is revealed,
Inevitably,
As fallible to the
Growing child,
So Time
In its distain for
All fragility
Grants
Us our irrevocable progress,
A fabric too dense
Almost
To lift,
Except in memory. A marvel there, at least.