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This poem is taken from PN Review 66, Volume 15 Number 4, March - April 1989.

Above sea-level Michael Ayres

So the foxred cones on the firs
     separated from us
by a dry-stone wall which
edges our view over the dropping valley

are passed on: it's a terrain
roughened by squalls but
trenchant and far away from you.
Night here is utterly private.
Cutting my finger on a stone
is how I suffer. The cones
are passed on, though change
is their condition, though
consumed, they are forgotten.

The wireless
weeps drifting for a station,
babbling and whining the world's spaces.
...


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