High House

Light splices the knotted branches of the willow,
With the world having shifted,
Shifted colour
And with it some strange sensation too.
Even at 2am when the sky is so north
That the blue daze of your eyes
Might become the dazzle of the Nordic Lights,

It is as if the earth is a protruding belly,
Brooding over its carefully stowed away
Baby. Our home on the hill is at the top.
And you are flushed, warm,
Smiling on the edge,
By the picket fence we put up
In a parody of an old film.

We are captured in that film. Our lives
Like scarlet carsons. Such a veil is over our eyes
It feels like only we exist.

The ground is iron and we shiver,
Shiver like rain
As it slips from the pine needles, unable
To hold on any longer to those tiny fibrous fingers.
We are isolated.
Alone on our blue hill.
Even the birds lull their gypsy song beyond our world.
If this were all, I would smile always.

If it was, that we could never leave,
Then I would just be.
The corpses of my mind would never stir
In this iridescent light of a land steeped in the archaic.
And the antediluvian alacrity of my doubt
Would remain in this stillness
Where the black yew points up towards
The eternal blue.

How I wish that I would never have to walk
Past the white picket fence
Past the place where you stand, face to the wind,
Face in the sunlight,
Past you… and through the gate to hell.