year's end

After the floods at nightfall I stand in the wet field on soil so sodden it can receive and absorb no more. I stand and look at the purity of the moon in a clear sky with its slipstream-rider planets through the pure branches of the ash unadorned momentarily by the urgent blandishments and flourishments of the biological imperative of bud leaf fruit reproduce so that they    the branches    are nearly essential nature and while I know they are not really inert and beneath the skin the constant processes of xylem and phloem the rising and falling continue it looks from here as if they are bone neither dead nor living

and there is such a relief in this suspension from the endless becoming of everything – though still the stream in the valley naked and full as in pregnant harries and rushes the edges of the land and its chattering of secrets distracts so I tune it out and gaze again

 this pure moon sky

      and the ash twigs and me suspended in a kind of calm like the minute hiatus where the lungs are neither on exhale nor inhale but a moment fleet eternal like the old year winding down to zero but the new not-yet-born-into coming-to-pass (into transience)
     in the hedge the creamygreen phosphorous glow of the new hellebore flowers the soft high chatter of the roosting redwings
     and I think of the clutter of consciousness the clitter and chatter of thought and emotion that becomes who we think we are and the endless craving the narcissism the way we paint each others' faces with the I want I need of our own dreams and fears

the complex jangle along the entangled ganglia when I look at you so that my thoughts churn back and over and nothing ever seems simple

     and how hard to still ourselves enough to really witness the here now of this ticking earth beneath my bootsoles and the dreaming wren and vole in the hedgerow

and how tired I am of the endlessness of it all

of consciousness

yet when I stare long enough the way the shadows of the hedge simply dissolve this I this you this pissy little bundle of ego and atoms into a kind at last

of quiet