Imagine a wood
in Wales, virtually in England
a mile away as crows who nest in it
fly. The wood is small and scruffy.
Sheep can get in; a cow from time to time disrupts the undergrowth, the private life. The wind makes the noise winds always make
in Wales
with one difference: it sounds like Ireland when pulled from the west.
Laid up in London you weather yourself against pain and pain’s narrow horizon
by learning the wood by heart: from memory, from articles on coppicing or fungi.
Imagine negotiating an overdraft
in a soft wind with rain, in late autumn,
to purchase a wood you are unlikely to wander. Naturally the purchase is value-adding
as you live by the wood and mean to live
in the wood
forever, gifted to an environment.
But with memory’s eye and almost dead centre of the wood lies a pool, mud with water on it, which hides like a lost coin the mind’s secret:
to live, live, walking against a wind
in Wales, in the mind, that lets you live in Ireland.

Readings

Grey Gowrie: 'Marches' read by Niall Buggy
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