1
December, nightfall at three-thirty.
I climb Mill Hill
past hawthorne and wild cherry,
mist in the hedgerows.
Smoke blows
from the orange edges of fire
working the wheat
stubble. “Putting
the goodness back,
into the soil.”
2
I drove from London to Thaxted, the fog
matted around the headlights.
Suddenly
a thudding white shape in the whiteness,
running huge and frightened, lost
from its slow stream..
3
The mill drew up to power
the dark underneath it
through tunnels like the roots of a beech
that spread to the poles
and down to the center of the earth.
Fire breaks out in the fields
because the wheel of the mill does not turn.
Fog stacked in the hedges.
Now the windmill
flies, clattering its huge wings, to the swamp.
I make out cliffs of the Church,
houses drifting like glaciers.
4
I envied the man hedging and ditching,
trimming the hawthorne, burning branches
while wasps circled in the smoke of their nest,
clearing a mile of lane, patches of soot
like closed holes to a cave of fire,
the man in his cottage
who smokes his pipe in the winter, in summer
digging his garden in ten o’clock light,
the man grafted entirely to rain and air,
stained dark
by years of hedging and ditching.
5
The close-packed surface of the roots
of a root-bound plant
when I break the pot away,
the edges white and sleek as a swan …
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