Feeding Out – Wintering Cattle at Twilight

The wind is inside the hill.

The wood is a struggle---like a wood

Struggling through a wood. A panic

Only just holds off---every gust

Breaches the sky-walls and it seems, this time,

The whole sea of air will pour through,

The thunder will take deep hold, roots

Will have to come out, every loose thing

Will have to lift and go. And the cows, dark lumps of dusk

Stand waiting, like nails in a tin roof.

For the crucial moment, taking the strain

In their stirring stillness. As if their hooves

Held their field in place, held the hill

To its trembling shape. Night-thickness

Purples in the turmoil, making

Everything more alarming. Unidentifiable, tiny

Birds go past like elf-bolts.

Battling the hay-bales from me, the cows

Jostle and crush, like hulls blown from their moorings

And piling at the jetty. The wind

Has got inside their wintry buffalo skins,

Their wild woolly bulk-heads, their fierce, joyful breathings

And the reckless strength of their necks.

What do they care, their hooves

Are knee-deep in porage of earth---

The hay blows luminous tatters from their chewings,

A fiery loss, frittering downwind,

Snatched away over the near edge

Where the world becomes water

Thundering like a flood-river at night.

They grunt happily, half-dissolved

On their steep, hurtling brink, as I flounder back

Towards headlights.