After sunset

A head torch does no good in this - the rain, pooled

in footprints, reflects the gloam more brightly than my bulb,

and it’s footsteps I must follow now, the last half mile

before the coming tide and slipping light embarrass me.

Nor can I chart the harbour’s sounds clearly enough:

the road’s hum meets and mingles in the air with the soft alarm

of beating wings, the flocks settling and starting up,

looking for their piece of night. The voices spin together

like two kestrels clashing in mid air then pirouetting

down towards the marsh. And then I see that glow on the horizon,

so much brighter than these few houselights tinkling the waves:

the town’s crown flares above the trees. Though it is not burning

the clouds have caught its flames in a black sky.

This beacon draws me back against myself,

back towards the day as all else swirls to night.

Is this because I share with it a fellowship? We are both

infiltrators, stepping out to where we’re tolerated, and not loved,

and that allowance only because, for clouds as much as

shelducks and redshanks, there is no dialogue, no talking back;

yet just as neither of us should be where we are, so much less

do we care to take our places in the dark.

And then there is that other thing I know,

that if I’d never left the city, if indeed we all went back,

we unnecessary twitchers in the mud, and rent ourselves

from wigeons’ calls and migratory visitors

there’d be no footsteps here for me to follow,

and no footsteps fencing rings around their ghetto in the dusk.

Receipt

The dish water is inked a thin maroon

from coffee and rabbit’s blood, the colour

of a winter tree at sunset. The butcher told me

it had been wild, not farmed. I took this from him

with my change and I was pleased.

Tonight the deer are away again,

through the window as the mist unspools

and I think as always at this time

of the headless carcase on the lane.

I wonder if they’ve left me on their own

or whether they were killed as I know happens

here for sport, though not by licence and not

in daylight. Some nights if you can’t sleep

you hear the cars in the field. Part of me hopes

that this is how it went, that the body

was one of many, and they haven’t gone

to other gardens, others’ lanes,

to bring blessings on the homes of my neighbours

like the shadowy little gods of evening that they are.