Sight Lines

 

Winter lays bare the structure of the world:

How that folds into this, and where the joint

Between the upland and the lowland lies;

The run of rivers, the true shapes of hills,

And what the early men saw from the heights 

When first they breasted that commanding place

And saw the world laid out in diagram,

An etching of itself, a living map,

Upon which clouds in shadow slowly moved –

Above-below them, tiny birds in flight.

 

It’s like the curtain of the world draws back,

Revealing, for a moment, strange machines

Whose ropes and pulleys make the whole thing run;

And then, in spring, the show begins again,

And lushness hides what deprivation showed:

That scarecrow earth on which we live our lives –

Warm things in peril in a colder place.