Box Hill

Sticky descent down Box Hill, spattered in “meadowsweet”

             Adonis blue butterflies perform 

brushstrokes – sky sours

                                    melon-pink – my face oaken, oblong –

            A rotten sign is burnt onto the sky.

Matters not if it’s rotten, the message blazes anew.

            Dusk, stranded on my feet, these ridgeways

Flow from plum to cobalt to pitch. Inaudible muscles

            Are switching paints with the hills.

How I teeter this minute

                        in mid-decipherment

            signs raining down

                                    thru meadowlights

striping outcroppings

            of adder-tongued trees –

                           The inkwell hour      I think      an overflowing thought

of pure Mind     all remedial “I” pouring into

                           monolithic grasses, slantwise, as foxes seem to lunge  

            when moon summoned –

The earth is a shaggy village

                        Swaddled in branches      waking hungry

            among missing compass points     

                                    torn sheets 

                                                in the lichen’s well

            if this is darkest water       

she lets me thru