Keats could never look at a tree without seeing
a dryad as well. Doomed to download
the old with the new, were his visions
suffused with the past? As I, though aware
of pastoral blots, am locked inside some
Arcadian myth, homesick for history’s
off-cuts and waste, like pots in a midden,
fossils and pollen, artefacts, relics, scraps
of a manuscript, an ice-age snail the size
of a button, giants whose bodies are hills.
The Emperor Constantine, gripped
by his dreams had power to recall
ten thousand at least ... Some traces of these
must be turning collective, seeping
through aeons and into my brain with infusions
of perfume or smells of the earth like
feathers and parsley, breath of hot cattle,
turds and wet dung in the straw