It was a mild Christmas, the small fine rain kept washing over,
so I coated myself in plastics,
walked further than I could manage.
Leave me now, I’d say, and when they had tramped ahead
I’d sit myself down on a stone or the side of a high grass ditch,
or anywhere – like a duck in a puddle –
I’d rest a bit, then I would muddle around
the winding boreens that crawled the headland.

Sometimes, water-proofed and not caring,
I’d sit in a road which was really a stream-bed,
being and seeing from down where the hare sees,
sitting in mud and in wetness,
the world rising hummocky round me,
the sudden grass on the skyline,
the fence-post, with the earth run from under it,
swinging like a hanged man.

Then I would want to praise
the ease of low wet things, the song of them, like a child’s low drone,
and praising I’d watch how the water flowing the track
is clear, so I might not see it
but for the cross-hatched place where it runs on a scatter of grit,
the flat, swelled place where it slides itself over a stone.
So now, when you write that you labour to strip off the layers,
and there might not, under them, be anything at all,

I remember that time, and I wish you had sat there, with me,
your skin fever-hot, the lovely wet coldness of winter mud
on your red, uncovered hands,
knowing it’s all in the layers,
the flesh on the bones, the patterns that the bones push
upwards onto the flesh. So, you will see how it is with me,
and that sometimes even sickness is generous
and takes you by the hand and sits you
beside things you would otherwise have passed over.