Kennall Vale

Chill air packs this valley
nostril-burning, pine-spiked cold
that creaks like trodden snow.
 
The bright currency of beeches
spills pear-yellow on each bank
near eddying twig rafts
absorbed in solving
the problem of perpetual motion
as the river crashes past
beneath a larch diplodocus
ossified in death,
its last roar replayed
in a constant loop
by the falls below.
 
Water pours down
drubbing the granite,
a washing of stone
erodes densities of lines
linking faults, crossing spaces,
shifting with a liquid nudge
stretched columns of daylight.
Wrens fly here
landing silently on ledges,
spider-hunting between
emerald liverworts
that mottle the walls.
 
Far above, in the long silence of trees,
sky slides blueness through fissured lips
as sun slips in a brief french kiss.

Reeve Atkinson

published in Equinox, 2008, ISSN 1469-8617