Winter Trails

The Way it Goes

Sunday sky, mixed messages, metaphors.
There is a classic stack of smoke signals,
there a threatening mass,  gurning Odin.
While we buy herbs, nature decides for us
to furnish clear blue sky,  liquid dazzle.
And yet again we drive with visors down,
silhouettes on fire ahead and every
car a mirror for the sun.

Hedge-high sun picks out every small tussock:
dark crevasses yawn in gold-green pasture
and in our heads as her* fierce questions strobe.
We grit our teeth, with smarting eyes drive on
under fire, though straddled with sunburst on
crazy road twists, by turns betrayed and saved.

As always in a winter afternoon
time tells against our sweet adversary –
when she stops punishing we will miss her.
Each bush, hedge, tree fills basketwork of fire.
A gritter flings its handful, rattling sour.

Far over rolling field and Cheshire plain,
sun paints out, in masterly style, white line
of chimneys and buildings, echoed in sky
by a low, fat duck procession of cloud
as ornaments pinned over mantelpiece
of a pastel horizon.

Already Ravenwood’s in sombre shade
and its birches stand like thin ghosts in shock
on this still day looking down on 'Van Gogh'
fields, painted with light on ice-tracks between
tall ridges sown with winter corn, shining
the young shoots  - while pigeons soothe and ravens
invade our minds, rending intensity
to wreckage of a stunned minute's dreamtime.

Ourselves regained in part, the long plateau,
a cold wind whines, ‘Ice?’ rhetorically
and every laboured breath is refreshing
as a mint. On Raw Head, raven-circled,
a flock of jackdaws squabbles in a field
below, and later when we’ve  dropped down far
returning to the car, Chinese dragon,
a flock of finches passes forever
buzzing us within its coils a little while -
fragments bubbling after.

............................

*Hobbit-like, I have decided the sun is feminine today.