to its full height, and hugs it like a bear.

Upright, it seems to have doubled in size.

Whatever he wears is filthy and torn,

the pins and needles of splinters and spells

are under his nails and deep in his hands

like thorns. And when he tears himself away

it stays, held up by nothing more than air.

However, mass like that, the sort, weighed flat,

to break a back or trip a heart attack,

amounts to nothing stacked; and yet a hair

can trigger it, a tap from something slight

can topple it, say timber and it tips.

In this case someone serves up half a brick

that clips the crosspiece on the left-hand arm;

it twists, turns face about, tilts and quickens,

mimics the act of launching a discus,

the east and west of its cardinal points

beginning to roll, its axis falling

out of centre, out of true. Then it lands—

a noiseless splashdown in a pool of ash

invoking a mushroom of sparks and chaff

that takes its time to winnow and settle,

to clear. Hats in the air, and a loud cheer.

And it simmers and stews in its own steam,

then ignites. Those expecting an incense

of palm and cedar, the scent of olive

and cypress, are surprised by the odour

of willow and oak and pine and alder,

resins and oils from the Colne and Calder

that babble and lisp as they mix with fire.

Warmth for an hour, but not a minute more.

And blackness follows every burst of flames

that leaves us cold again, hands pocketed,

outdone, outshone, left in the shade by stars

that boil with light when the dark inflames them,

put to shame by shapes and constellations

that were dead and countersunk and buried,

hammered home in deep space. Like the new view

of the full moon, on full beam, in full bloom,

the open silver flower of the moon,

the boulder of the moon or the moon’s shield,

hallmarked with valleys and rivers and fields,

the streams and snakes and fossils of the moon,

the long plumbago nights and graphite days,

the mercury seas and mercury lakes

of the moon, the moon on a plate, the date

and the name and the make of the full moon.

Under which we figure out the next move.

Off to the west, at the boarding kennels,

low down in the fringe of the sky, level

with chimneys, the crowns of trees and pylons,

a star, four-sided, breaks the horizon—

light in the shape of a dormer window—

and out of its frame a man emerges,

naked and bald and mad, head and shoulders,

and says his piece, shouts the odds about dogs

and vomit, fools returning to folly,

and the hounds in his keeping fratch and fret

or clatter the mesh of his twelve-foot fence.

And on the one hand someone rattles off

the preconditions, lists them one by one:

for little, wedding, middle, index, thumb,

read pressure, discharge, friction, action, heat