trout

Winter Storm

Richard Reeve

Like the man who justified his suicide attempts with the answer, "it's cheaper",
it moved with an inscrutable logic. Roads, smeared by the winter swell,
moulded under the wheels of a tractor. By a line of fence posts
a throng of sheep, newly shorn, hung to the ditch, their zigzag skeletons
shivering in the July wind,

                              each, like himself, part of the morning's climate,
conducive, unready, their locked eyes scouring the wires for shoots to eat.
In its hood of land, the bay writhed. White-caps broke on the cars
that wound over the hills; and deep in the core of a wind-wrecked tree

the ocean cried like a dog. Hung-over, sleepless, bloated with the night,
I clung to the wheel, steering the remembering I had become part of
into a turn-off, where ducks, weathering the twisted argument of the sky,
hid in the grass. And thought of his tired lips. And how their beaks,

bent from the gale, might almost have been our common ground,
a detail lifted from the immense strain of things, connecting the sea's rage
with the wild hopelessness
                              that emanated from his corrugated brow:
his drained hands closed round a cigarette, some mighty joy showering
across the trodden marshes of his face, as he dreamed of his death.