SELF PORTRAIT

Grey on white, the pencil congregates
   Its immutable wisps, its flecks of form:
He is draughting a portrait of himself
   As someone else - sheer image
Without biography. Inhabiting the skin
   No longer from inside, he declares it there
As pure stranger, a bush of lines
   Growing before his eyes, until
There stares at him out of its own profusion
   That other awakened from himself and slowly
Across the space consenting recognition.


THE NIGHT FARM

It seemed like a city hidden in the hill,
And this the first house with its flaring panes -
A forge, it might be, from which the fire pulsed out
...