Christopher North
A Walk Near Chequers
Here the scarp doesn’t want anxiety.
The clear and levelled paths, dozy trees
and Chequers, squat and content,
seem bedded in orderliness;
a Chiltern vale with cottages,
kissing gates and trim farms;
scabious, cranesbill, hawkbit
pointing the wash of landscape with their
watercolour specks as if they hung
in a county tea-shop
and so a fine October day
becomes banal; wanting more, it has a taint,
a yawn of discontent.
Maybe a glimpsed
alignment would enliven: tumuli, steeple,
a farm gate and through lynchet meadow,
a line drawn to a snow-streaked summit.
No. It needs explosion:
pluming flames from the mansion window,
or groaning lovers deep in buckthorns;
hedges writhing into forest,
the thin whine of distant wolves,
and buzzards circling,
lower and lower,
the yearling’s paddock.
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