If you had a caravan
Would that make you
A particular kind of person
If then in November
You camped on the top
Of this most desolate of moors
Would that say something
About how you fit into society
In an hour, or less
It will be total darkness
Later the whisper of silence will arrive
I wonder to knock on your door
But ask myself, are you alone?
A smidgin of pink in a vast grey
A slip of silver white fading to blue
Creases of browns, half full blacks
Dull oranges turning to red
On the other side of the tarmacadam
On the other side of the interrupted
White lines; in both and all directions
Car headlights leave a twinkled glow
Even without the rain, which surely visits
Or has visited already, settled itself down
Into the squidgy peat bogs or drained itself
Off into catchments to by passed escarpments
Bracken-water, for coagulation and chlorination
To become crystal clear and drinkable once more
Yesterday you talked of place
Of the writers three month trip
to the Antarctic; you spoke of the congress
Also of nothingness in everlasting light
On the grey windswept moor
A stones throw from the graves declared
By Brady to torment Longford or to make capital
Out of the somewhat badly affected Myra Hindley
Reed grass angled at a quarter past the hour
Guards over the roughed up rippled water
There are no houses, neither on the horizon
Nor to right or left, human habitats are unseen
Among an unfortunate landscape of tainted beauty
Photographs composed as paintings
They easily suited utopia or dystopia
To cast doubt in that environment
Being entirely natural now, in this hour
Between day and night, here or wherever
In the world certainty is our hoped for companion
As we open the loose hinged doors
Or catch the last bus from the school yard
Or walk through the half lights of the old town
Into a stranger’s bedroom
Into a house of uneasy corridors
Of our own discouraged misunderstandings
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Your private view, my questions of nothingness
Your colony of artists in an unromantic city
My question, without answer; the foot of your page
Your new list, a white board for place and purpose
Of landscape and society, of energy (my word)
Of history and a sense of loss
That Americans can hardly imagine
The desolate mid west, the dust bowls
The world at war with new found proclaimers
The stains are almost gone. Your ancestors
And many many more, have left behind
All that you now most earnestly seek to re-establish