La Sélune 

by JANE LOVELL

She winds her serpent heart through
Ducey and beyond
past herons motionless in fields,
the dreary marshes of the Baie, its mist
and reen and fern;

carries in her grume the squirl of eel
and salmon, fogbound boom of bittern;

deeper still, the dislocated bones
of laggy boys, onetime farm boys
wielding leaden swords but finding
only cloud,

mudborn fighters felled by raiders
cresting distant hills,
drawing the horizon to a knot. 

Such short days, the churned-up mud,
the taste of it.

Now deep in silt, below her surface
of knapped flint they lie, safe
from lamp-eyed eels, the skilly current.

Beyond the farms, she barrels to the coast,
races swifts into the estuary,
floods pilgrim paths that wind across the sand,

charges clouds of saltbloom,
foaming sea-scrawl hauled in on the rush
of winter tides.

Earth exhales, the sky rolls in
and there’s a moment built from water, an instant
when there’s nothing but the glide and switch
of tern, lit and lost,
and lit again, above the sound.