Stan gets as far as
borrowing a mode
of transport from its rightful rower, then,
because he has forgotten to untie
the painter, he begins slowly to drag
the whole shore after his small paddle boat,
causing the hills ahead to unravel in
a compensatory stretching of the globe;
the lake to grin and spill its waters out
the corners of its moonlit mouth into
the bedrooms of the copulating poor.
Sheep lose their footing like a knitter loses
count, and fish wake in unfamiliar beds,
their local standing strangely compromised:
rowing like crazy, only Stan stays still.
At night I can attest the lakes are still
there, though it's only by the enormity
of each one's silence that you're sure of this.
And their hush differs from the hills because
you can fall in it and not find your voice,
because it' s full of voices swallowed and
never returned: each drop's a locked-out word
that mixes with the unheard songs of fish,
their bubble shanties on cold silt and worms.
Whereas the hills have thinned their echoes down
till sheep and laughter and that injured 'Help!'
become a sense of constant slow approach
to their pure silence, that will not arrive.
Silver How is Harlow in the morning light.
Sometimes she just climbs in the six-inch bath
of lukewarm mist, not shivering. She turns
orange, a tint that mountains think is game.
Sometimes she pulls the mist-sheet over her
and dreams of tiny erosive feet. She can
do anything with mist, including make
silk underwear, just like the pair she wore
in Double Whoopee under the black gown
Stan caught in the cab door: then she parades
her self before the Prince of Wales Hotel.
Sometimes she just casts off the whole shebang
of flopped cloud into blue's wardrobe, and sits
there, glowering, ruddy, bare beneath the pale
and fading Klieg light of the morning moon.
And how appropriate that 'Silver' is,
both for the screen that Jean so quickly filled
and quickly left, and for the platinum
that was her hair' s trademark, and yet her real
colour, like this hill now, was bracken red.
It isn' t easy for a mountain to
stand on its head: only the most graceful
will attempt it. So when all the crags that
line Thirlmere' s far side upended themselves
in that clearest mirror water, I knew
rare reversals were near. It wasn' t that
you couldn' t tell which way up you were, but
that the precise brink vanished, making one
new shape, an amber diamond, from each hill
and its image. Looking glass stuff, as mist
poured down from Keswick way, and the sky glowed,
till lakes themselves seemed mountains on their heads
made out of water reaching into dark
earth skies, cut off from their cloud roots by air.
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