DECEMBER IN THE SOUTH HAMS

Late in the day a mist breathed in the valley,
resting sedately at first on the brown water,
scarfing the river’s curling eddies, muffling
its bright chatter, then spooled across the meadow,
coiled around the legs of the foundering cows,
grabbed the gaudy hips in the hedge, snagged
on spikes of hawthorn and blackthorn, threaded through
dense hazel and ivy dormitories
of dozing blackbirds, of huddled wrens and dormice.

Frost struck in the night — fusing droplets
of mist onto bare branches like spring blossom,
like winter ghosts of wild cherry leaping
white out of the hedge in the morning sunlight.
Ice confines and silences the river.
The cows carry mother-of-pearl clouds
of breath as their slow feet crunch the stiff
grass. Beneath the hazel tree a blackbird
lies on its back, frost dusting its feathers.

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