scarpment swing-cycle

we crept through outflow tunnels
where fat females squatted ready to spill
offspring in the dank and down
a heather scarp to the shoreline
with the barrage ballast frozen in bitumen
as so many tiny mastodons further
to an enclosure where raindrops are counted
in a copper pan set in a recess at which
a small lonely fairy in the interval of a fey cycle
might come to touch the epitaxic water
directed there by chaos and back upon ourselves
down the fill slope and abutments
over the spillways cut through to the berm
and beyond with the moor reared up
above all the vertical heave of it spilling
up haze from a faraway fire
over the old road cut for the horsing
across of burnt limestone to the royds
and intakes deep now in moorland history
with a small boy who clutched fiercely
..................................a mangled banana
.
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