Self-isolation

(Keswick-Threlkeld Railway Path, Feb 2021)

1865. The first train to travel the line.
A young girl, in her final year of childhood,
turns to her mother as the train sweeps round
another long-slow accelerated bend, and asks her,

‘are we flying?’

Her mother doesn’t answer. She is too consumed
by the creaking feeling of her ribs expanding
and contracting as she breathes, as if to wonder:
is this all that’s involved in living? 

I see two dead branches of a tree
as mossy antlers. The oak in the centre
of the passing river withstands white waters.
Bare fenceposts step gingerly into the flowing
water. Toes pointed like a Degas dancer.

100 years from now, the young girl’s perspective
shall have long been shadowed by tunnels of trees.
The bark in the soil around her grave feels rougher
than the space between her thumb and forefinger.

Boulders, just beneath the surface of water.
Eddies pushing back upstream.

If you’d only asked her, she’d have told you.
Scepticism is but a narrowing of river bend.
A world of so much news and so much nothing, faster.
Such trees such train such river to the dipping
of the sun behind the trees’ horizon.