A Kind Of Bright Darkness Poem by Giles Watson

There is a stile still standing in the ghost
of a hedge, and a broken gate beside it, opening
on the pathless nowhere of a ploughed field.

I don't walk there; nor do I retrace my steps
down the route I did not take to get here.
Cuckoos are silent, so next time, I must be

gone. The nearer ground has lapsed to shadow;
the middle distance echoes with a kind of bright
darkness, as though the slow alchemy of sun

and soil has not made gold, but crumbling crusts
of verdigris. The sky is strewn, as at an augury,
with molten copper: to scry it is to go blind.

This aching transmutation of light into a sightless
knowing is all that I can give you: my hands and feet
have vanished. No one walks. The landscape is in flux.