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The first time I met them, we slept where they grew,
swam into milky darkness, mist, then four of us
huddled in my friend’s van: frankfurters in a sleeve.
We read – what did we read? Each time we found a new
constellation, we read them a line, a passage of ——?
A walking meditation, scanning the ground,
eating as we harvested: our focus so intense it seemed
as if we’d lost something tiny and vital to our existence.
In Potawatomi, there is a word, puhpowee, ‘the force
that causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight’.
Liberty caps, ghost hats, every spore with its own conatus.
Further in, we sat on the tor that looks like a face in profile:
hair pushed back to the sea, gazing out over miles
of bracken, clitter, gorse; a bas-relief, the kind one lover
might make for another. I imagined having sex with my friend
on the granite at dawn or sunset. Lust must have happened
here before: the thighs of my ancestors’ burnt and gold-lit.
They’re not having any effect, I thought; looked up –
a flock of plovers, high, the light on them, turning:
Oh! I said, glitter, and ran towards a poem.
It was a book I loved we’d read on Haytor.
I was surprised my friend had it – ah, that’s it:
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac. ‘I am glad
I will not be young in a future without wilderness.’
When I translate this line into animate languages
few equivalents exist, or it becomes ‘inland forest’,
‘frozen sea’, ‘us’; a gust of red dust across a low sun.