A sapling senses the end of Summer

I



These beaded threads of morning moisture
Stretched across our hardening antlers
Come upon us in our sleep and we seem to be sleeping longer,
Longer since our leaves have left us.

Heavy in the dark they become lighter as the light up-rises.
This binding silk is not bondage to us
But through it we detect little tremors in all our parts.
When that happens it is like the wind but not the wind

But like the wind it stirs us from our light-green reveries
Since we know that sound of something airborne all too well.
It has been around us, everywhere, while it has been warm.
A kind of singing that is not singing, just coming and going,

And sometimes we feel the sensation of a sudden shudder
Which shakes these sparkling crystals and then the singing stops And while they fall there is a moment of silence
That is taut and tense in which we wait to hear them shatter.

The Clerks' Well, Clerkenwell, London

The Clerks' Well, Clerkenwell (in memory of Jane Wisner)

Rest a while, traveller
And imbibe at this well

Present long before any human presence
Sought to haul me up
From a hole, deeply bored
In the ground, I lay undiscovered

Until a fissure cracked the earth
And sent me rippling out over bright stones.
Since when I became sacred, appropriated
And around me all life congregated.

There wasn't a time when I didn't exist.
I came into being at the very beginning
And my molecules still carry the memory
Of that moment across the whole globe.

I am that cloud caught drifting
Across the plains of Tanzanier.
I am crystallized in the frozen wastes
Of the Tundra

I hang in the misty humidity
Of the Rain Forest. Irrigate
The tea hills of the Himalayas.
Plash in a fountain in Tivoli.

I have quenched the thirst of a goatherd
And trickled down the face of the one
Who had dug this well.
This well, where all these waters coalesce

Around which the whole world pivots
Will be remembered, well.


1st version

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