Jane Draycott
'The Night Tree'
Secondly there are the beams or sales
sometimes called petals or branches
which on account of their reaching out
through all the timetables of dark
we are forever working to maintain
and which passing vessels have likened
to the after-death appearances of saints
or the ashes of great seafarers set up
as a beacon at the gate of a new land
where like a mermaid a ship
would be almost certain to founder.
Next there is ourselves, each man
on his watch for the deception of fog
or the shudder of the tower,
each in his turn keeping awake
for the sake of the light by his reading
of Plutarchís Parallel Lives, our one book
relayed on the stairs between watches
or else in the pinning of moths flattened
like leaves in the lantern, whose wings
like a searchlight come sweeping our walls
later, finding each of us out in our beds.
But first as I say there is the sea
which is a forest, our blades
cutting through like a photograph,
travellers caught frozen, a sequence
of light and dark pathways, hourglasses,
rain, where time travels even more slowly
as if at great height or in exile and men
report voices heard crying in darkness,
though for myself I think it is only the seals
calling to each other in their language
through all the leafiness of the night.