The Levels

Past Quaking Houses,
on the bull neck of the north Pennines, that has no head,
in a flat torn sky,
wind circling among hills, like a miner
with a wide shallow bowl, panning—
above Alston, I went with my nets
to dismal grass-blobbed flats, reaching
into the Solway’s firth, soft basement
to rubbed, soft water
not poisoned yet by fission, where the fish frisk
in a dismal sort of way. Their tails lash
the brunette forms of the sea.

My nets an impediment over shoulders, catching
at knees, or scraping the back of calf and thigh.
On a journey not so big as a rushlight,
the bog’s rushes smeared with sheep’s fat,
I went. The quaker graveyard still scythed
of nettle and its remedy, dock. At Silloth
I threw my nets into the sea,
their meshes chagrined with a dead
exposure to air, and no fish.
Nets that weighed on me, hiss in the floating sea.
For hours, against the sea’s pull
tugging like any fish’s mouth, green flimsy
triangles of salt wrinkling greek characters
on sifting illiterate sand.