How light does marble it...

Consequent upon the quality of light,
upon the way it marbles, limestones, sycamores
the space in any way that sun, rain, fog or snow
may sanction or suggest, in ways amenable
to all the sculpting skills that landscape brings.

The torn edge blurred by firs or cypresses,
the distant concaves that the hills have carved,
the spruce that splits the tight form down the grain,
and here, between the wild rose and the reed,
a tension that no heft from elsewhere overthrows.

But this is landscape with a fourth dimension
the open door to movements, moments of expression
from outside: a figure, sheep or cattle, water, clouds
or winds among the branches or the genuflecting flax.
Small movements and each momentary stillness speak

of presences among the rivulets, the vetch and chest-
nuts hung with dots and dashes now to give them meaning -
our light punctuation or white notes along a stave:
the dry stone wall, the cottage and the barn, both thatched.
Each time you look it will have changed - but just a touch.

Because we invoke meaning, sometimes all too glibly,
there is no option but to let the landscape in,
incorporate it in the soul of us. (To others, though,
we are immersed in what they see.) Our intervals,
the measures of those distances from beasts that roam to us.