My next poem takes this concern about water,
about the flux of the universe, about the flux
of matter and living things.
About the cycle of the elements, and takes it outside that room,
but tries not to divorce itself from a particular person.
Now this is a poem about the Lake District in England,
where water is plentiful.
When it streams off the hilltops,
and forms gigantic and beautiful lakes.
And so plentiful is it, that the ordinary domestic user
of electricity can use water power in the backyard
of an ordinary wooden wheel.
And there are many farms and houses there,
that simply draw upon the heights of the mountains
and the water falling down it for the lights, the force,
the electricity of their houses.
Their warmth and their power of electricity.
The thing they see by, the thing they keep themselves warm by.
And this is a poem about this cycle.
It was an actual place.
There is a tarn at the top of the hill, which
always keeps full.
And the water streaming down, turns the electrical wheel
a simple wooden one for this woman, Mrs. Tyson, which
is a famous Lake District name.
And I try and look out towards that, and come back to it.
"The Force."
At Mrs. Tyson's farmhouse, the electricity
is pumped off her backbone wooden wheel outside.
Greased, steady, it spins within a white torrent
that stretches up the rocks.
At night, its force bounds down and shakes the lighted rooms.
Shakes the light.
The mountains force comes towering down to us.
High near its summit, the brink is hitched
to an overflowing squally tan.
It trembles with stored storms, that pulse across the rim to us
as light.
On a gusty day like this, the force lashes its tail.
The sky abounds with wind stuffed rinds of cloud,
that sprout clear force.
Throbbing in squalls of the sea, where the sun
stands pouring down at itself.
And makes the air grow tall in spurts, whose crests turn over
in the night wind foaming.
We spin like a loose wheel, and throbbing shakes our light
into winter and torrents dangle.
Sun pulls up the air in fountains.
Green shoots, forests flinching up at it in spray of branches,
sends down clear water and the loosened torrent
down into Mrs. Tyson's farmhouse backyard.
That pumps white beams of its crest, in a stiff breeze
lashes its tail down the rocks.