the sea vows they came from a wave,

foamy, salt-maned, galloping inland;

death claims it will set them

to pulling a hearse,

and love

goes riding, all night, bareback,

hunting itself.

They dreamed them, the local dead,

ghosts of war-horses,

warriors’, heroes’,

asleep in the landscape;

woke to the white horses shining

high over woods and farms;

young ancestors working the fields,

naming them his, hers, ours.

They sensed them, pulling the county

deep into England,

harnessed, history’s;

their scent sweet on the air –

wheat, hops, hay, chalk, clay.

Then stars nailed shoes to their hooves.

The conservationists climb the hills

away from their cars,

new leucippotomists

with implements to scour and groom,

scrub and comb.

On a clear day,

from twenty miles,

a driver sees a white horse

printing its fresh, old form on turf

like a poem.

Luke Howard, Namer of Clouds

Eldezar and Asama Yama, 1783,

erupted violently; a Great Fogg

blending incredible skies over Europe.

In London, Luke Howard was ten.

The sky’s lad then.

Smitten,

he stared up evermore; saw

a meteor’s fiery spurt,

the clamouring stars;

what the moon wouldn’t do;

but loved clouds most –

dragons and unicorns;

Hamlet’s camels, weasels and whales;

the heads of heroes;

the sword of Excalibur, lit

by the setting sun.

Mackerel sky,

mackerel sky, not long wet,

not long dry.

And knew

love goes naming,

even a curl of hair – thus, Cirrus.

Cumulus. Stratus. Nimbus.

The Woman in the Moon

Darlings, I write to you from the moon

where I hide behind famous light.

How could you think it ever a man up here?

A cow jumped over. The dish ran away with

the spoon. What reached me were your joys, griefs,

here’s-the-craic, losses, longings, your lives

brief, mine long, a talented loneliness. I must have

a thousand names for the earth, my blue vocation.

Round I go, the moon a diet of light, sliver of pear,

wedge of lemon, slice of melon, half an orange,

silver onion; your human sound falling through space,

childbirth’s song, the lover’s song, the song of death.

Devoted as words to things, I gaze, gawp, glare; deserts

where forests were, sick seas. When night comes,

I see you gaping back as though you hear my Darlings,

what have you done, what have you done to the world?

Parliament

Then in the writers’ wood,

every bird with a name in the world

crowded the leafless trees,

took its turn to whistle or croak.

An owl grieved in an oak.

A magpie mocked. A rook

cursed from a sycamore.

The cormorant spoke:

Stinking seas

below ill winds. Nothing swims.

A vast plastic soup, thousand miles

wide as long, of petroleum crap.

A bird of paradise wept in a willow.

The jewel of a hummingbird shrilled

on the air.

A stork shawled itself like a widow.

The gull said:

Where coral was red, now white, dead

under stunned waters.

The language of fish