The Howe

The Howe

i.

The municipal slate houses rest up
against the Howe like glaciers
while erratic boulders lodge

in the drystone dykes as the ice begins
to melt. We’d remembered to ask
the moraine to close the gate
the way the private gatekeeper asked

us to but it? said nothing.
The semi-detached glacier leans
against my bedroom window glass.
The local authority has removed
the offending static caravan

the neighbours had installed without asking.
I take comfort from the permanence
of extra-terrestrial lichens in the nearby
woods and fluffy rocks. The future is plucked
ready for the pot. I open my window
and fill my cup with meltwater.

ii.

It’s 1990,
and the beginning of a new decade
is mining for compliments that the
approaching millennium sniffs at:

Banks of slaty cleavage. Compression.
Shale type sediments of ash.
‘Who are you calling a slag?’

To Rigghead Quarry and back
as a euphemism for.
I was the kind of teenager who.

(My mother has returned from holiday
in the Alps bearing the gift of a sage,
lavender and white shellsuit).

I was the kind of teenager who wanted
to talk about juniper, and the art of
supporting an unfashionable football team
to Rigghead Quarry and back.

I’ve thought about tippexing out
the mine workings that you’ve written
in the side of the nearby fells
but instead I just rip out the offending
pages of my jotter. Are we still best friends
and is it raining again?

Yet more meltwater.
I’ve been learning how to learn, economically.
I walk to the top of creation and destroy
the evidence.

I’m wiping the slate clean with you.

iii.

Imagine a solar system
made of moss.
Jupiters of liverwort.
Miniatures in maximum.
Howe to end.

I sit down on the summit of
the smallest nearest mountain.
Remember how I lost my diary
yesterday and what this makes
of every subsequent tomorrow.

If you find my diary? Live it.
Follow all my lost commitments to
the end.