William Bibby

NIGHT WALK

I had set out late on a bad evening, losing ideas,
while a shower gathered in the tops of the trees,
with every stride characteristics I recognized

as the rain slipped down toward safe quarters
and tribes of undernourished frogs came out and winked,
burning with desire, everything so wet it was on fire.

There was nothing man-made for fourteen thousand yards
except a dual-carriageway from right to left across a moor;
I had a map but the print swelled like mucous and the paper tore.

But here, at last, was the stream, slaked brown with peat
and small swift sliding trout; here the planken bridge
the water demands, its sylphids, its pebble hearts,

the flowers crowding the bank. Silver birch and holly
gently dim their bark and berried night that
reaches down to dissolve it all except its sound.

The dark almond dusk imagines itself and me,
the eidolon, the rummage for direction, the compass
needle’s compact float to north, the dripping syntax

of trees and leaves and night deer, velvet horned,
glades inflating space between what remains;
a paraselene on a halo where memory lives
walking into it and how the eye sees at last what is lit