Let us suppose your car packs up
out here. Beyond Broadwoodwidger,
St Giles On The Heath, Virginstow.
It is night - but here a darkness
that lives on these shapeless acres.
You walk the twisted lane a mile
then seeing lights you cut across.
Fields, hedges, a dark shadowed copse.
Fields, a gate, the woodland edge.
What do you feel? You feel the quiet,
brief, breath of an owl;
silence after the fox's cough.
What do you hear?
You hear the weight
of condensation on the grass,
a vast ocean of bending blades.
A hundred rabbits knew your sound
through the earth, long before the air
announced your voice or waved your scent.
Here there is nothing to save you.
If you lie down now this wet ditch
may be your decomposing place.
Who will find you? Only strangers.
Still the dark place will keep moving,
eating, weatherbound, star stared.
Out here, in the eyes of spiders,
the fright of jays, the quick knee-jerk
of a crickets ear, a moment
considered, passing, forgotten.
The only trace: a disturbance
in the scent blown down from the wood;
an imprint on the retina
of a cow's large soft eye, fading.
Marc Woodward
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