‘Wakening at night
in an unfamiliar place’
Wakening at night in an unfamiliar
place,
the window on the road whose name
he can’t recall, the moonlight on his face;
but what will come is not the same
as what has gone. Beneath, a sense of haste
—perhaps most clear in the stillest hour—
lays bare an apparition in the march and waste
of night. He listens: hears the mower
whet the scythe. So clear. The moon’s traverse
is on the silent fields; the hedge-line trees,
as he does, listen to the sound, unterse,
deeper than foundations of their forms. He sees
beyond his sight the shadowed swath, knows,
maybe — even as the slow-cast night ablates —
a little of the being that he is; light grows
on him, a part-known mode of unknown states.