And drags your vision through the intervening
Valley and foothills, where the suburbs spread
Like lichen over rocks,
Up to the mountain’s wind-smacked watershed,
Where intermittent shocks
Of sky collide and fits of sun come sheening,

Then pour away far out across the river
To pool and spatter there like cooling solder.
But this is not quite it.
Lower and closer by a foothill’s shoulder,
And weirdly overlit
In small white glimmerings that make you shiver,

Shapes of what must be seagulls circle round
Above what must be, though it is obscured
From where you catch the sight,
The dump – as though to harbinger and steward
Some process of the light
Intrinsic to this moment and this ground.

So, in that Rembrandt landscape, The Stone Bridge,
Between the roiling of dark clouded sky
And bridge and stream below,
All shadow now, the sun stays to apply
The passage of its glow
To one brief clump of trees – a privilege

Of which the figures on the boats and road
Seem to be resolutely unaware.
How is it that those trees,
Holding that shaft of sun, can still be there,
As though the centuries
Could not get over such an episode,

As though that place and moment could appear
So piercingly only from far away.
Luminous and remote
Under the strobe-lit passage of the day,
The circling seagulls float
Somewhere that you can only see from here.