Round With Variations Poem by Michael Maxwell Steer

The warm car halts, its dials
glowing with consumer serenities.
Hand on key, the laughter
decays in a pool of enveloping
stillness humans fear.

Rough grass, a headlit jungle,
surging to downland whose whitening
scarred bones underpin
dark textured thickets of box elder -
grief amid the priests.

For it's into this
the flickering cooling minutes
call me; Opening,
the first rush of alien homecoming,
sharp as a governess,

where fractured shadows weave
and stumble in lateral distortion.
My coat is buttoned now:
as if it could afford me
shelter amid the spectres.

So long as light-brushed beeches
father your path, then in theory
retreat is possible:
but turning is blindness, postponed
or instant - choose which.

The cracked uncertain footfall,
the light grown dim, iridescence
in nature, gusted leaves;
wise or unwarned, eluded or
sought, the end's the same:

Rage then, if you choose, against the
death of light; metaphysical
pain made flesh made dust;
unquiet graves and the ungentle
nightfall's uncried tears.

Yet after? Velvet-breathed
air you can swim in, a kind of peace...
clear and silent cloud-wrack.
You and the night are at one -
hunting - sleeping - loving.

In time you are your maker,
focussing anger from tired eyes
along the mud-flanged pitfalls
others must cross before your vacant
frame buds green life dying.

On the North Downs at night: : 17 December 1979