…THAT HIGH HORSE RIDERLESS,

THOUGH MOUNTED IN THAT SADDLE HOMER RODE

—W. B. Yeats

Amid the yellow gorse, which pricked my jeans,

and purple foxgloves and bluebells—

puddles of hoofprints,

the footpath in places trampled to mire,

and not a horse to be seen.

Even when I reached the granite tor,

and the green high moor with its boulders,

swept by the wet benumbing wind from seaward,

widened before me, none to be seen.

Where were the words, the pages whipping back

and forth, in which the poet lies

on Zennor Carn In a bower of bramble?

Lies only in words,

having no bed, much less a grave

marked by any one

of these abraded boulders—

or, better, marked by this, a block

of granite, the one stone owing its shape to hands,

a monument to those that quarried the site

and dismantled the cairns. Where was the horse,

wings furled—within which one?

Above the spires of the fox

Gloves and above the bracken

Tops with their young heads

Recognizing the wind

(the boulders unmindful), a kestrel hovered,

circled and hovered, its shrill two notes

lost to the ear, caught by the wind straightway.

I'd set his words by saying them aloud

in stone, in this whose form evokes,

while granite is softening atom by obdurate atom,

a wind with hands to coax the stone

that's stubborn by design to foal.

for W. S. Graham (1918–1986)