And as being sadly tall among the misty swedes & turnips she goes to the summit where weeds spill over an abbey wall, like spidery froth pulled to right or left in the breeze, and she sloshes through the mud (to right or left)and is taken for an elegant heron in heels, revelatory without a cause & groundbreaking without a sigh, and rises like an early apple blooth, like the most expert bird in the world, & hides in the withy bed and avoids every lure imaginable— Tess the sexless, spotless in one last desperate plea for seed And as the nature of things is mean, (certainly as regards the cliffs, milk-thistles and finches) and she goes angrily but with determination, blindly but with angels, and as sins of the young shine in streams, like hontish stars, and lovers thrash in the wind, like Tess and her angel, and grieve as if the skies can squint and glane at them both & could even melt her down to the shadow of a ring, shame-faced girl, in her best boots who looks away from insane abbey walls, veiled, just loved and lost again in the woods And as singing her thresher's song she runs and runs again, til the rains finally fill her and a four-poster at home, with mistle-toe, can't still the winds, slipping in through the cracks and the figure of a finch, playing at his harp, awaits outside and Tess's taken from her stone...
(2010)
