A Thick Fold of Snow Skin

A Thick Fold of Snow Skin

The hedges, houses, and lanes that vanished in the dark

Have returned to the blurred earth roughly drafted in snow;

The ragged white drumlins look like clean laundry;

The laughing moon’s silence deafens the ears of angels;

The Corvally meadow field shines silver like a perch’s spiny fin;

The bog-black flaxhole wears the stars like an amulet;

But the spring well fixes the sky with an angry glass stare;

Its searing sacred eye breaks the full moon into pieces;

In the pub a piper plays a profane liturgy of sociability;

A thick fold of snow skin grows on his Vauxhall Viva.

Fiddle and accordion help him climb the bine shoots of a jig;

None hears the clock spring’s invisible tune as it slacks; 

Like Lazarus rising renewed from bed to milk his goats,

They will stamp the knife-glint morning crispness to the byre.