The masts hurl their arms
over the blue-black points
of the even-rowed pine farm,
turned by the wind which cantors
through the hills. The sky
is a slate-
drab vanishing sea
under which I pass,
tired and heavy:
heather's poor as a mattress
for walking, with its pits and lumps
and easing pad of moss.
The wind pumps
sing a one-note hymn
over the pine-children and pine-stumps.
I have been walking a long time.
The hymn is strange, like
beautifully sung Latin,
a flow of indistinct
speech . . . but For you,
inevitably, the choir
intones, and these words re-echo
loudly in my skull.
For you. The voice comes and goes,
loudlier, it seems, and shriller
in my head
than on the hills
where wind only moves and has always only moved.
For you the sardined pines.
For you the stripped moors rising round —
the moors over which, with only a tin
of cured ham and a flask
of moor-water tead brown with tannin
I pass.
The wind farm grows larger:
the hammer-throwing titans of the masts,
the singing of their swinging hammers:
a Promethean tribe asking
gently for the fire
it has already taken.
Their difficult howl. Its meaningless pitch.
I have been walking
a long time, watching
the vacant hills, the empty air,
the timber farm a blue-black rash I'd love to itch,
the wind farm drawing slowly near.
For you, the voice
repeats in a final drowning holler,
itself drowned in itself,
in its own alien tone.
What's left is pure noise,
a nonsense of vowel sounds,
harmonics
of metal and wind.
I'm getting a little nervous
at the scale and movement of it all,
the towers, smooth and cornerless,
the arms which don't carry so much as fall
through space
in a perpetual
tantrum of force.
There are no words here,
only the riot of the masts, now so close
they trump air
for height and man for pride
and God for fury.
These things we've made
obliterate all metaphor —
I can't even hold
a single mast in sight now, and despair
to find any peace,
any solitary hour
to sink in the cold grass
and dream a first cold dream.
Walk where I will, that speechless
sound will endure, will murmur
through wind and pine,
will rally the horizonless swarm.