And A Cloth Bled High

And a cloth bled high on a stick
raised for the noise of new dark.
Fields were spelt and fire-
smoke, harvest turned animal, pelt-
stripped for meat, trees mad with fruit
at their last. Winter was eating into us,
putting the lamb to its pen
and ay held a saying, small fire:

All to be done again. All to be told.

Round light then day were bounded.
Us pulled the field of its grain.
Deer, rough-coated for winter fled,
hid from us, unfed and stranged.

Wind-cut and high to sun,
the cloth soaked full, bled down.
By thorn-fire, by horses gelded and sore,
by a sun winter-lit in the eye of a lamb,
by a great tree in rags, aging
us bent to hear the earth dying.
Ay spoke through a fire’s low burning.