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The feeling of mountains lasts well into the forest,
the rain only falls for a moment and then I drive out
of the firs that are like ink stiffening on the page
and down into blue meadows and sloping gardens. The mountains
come with me all the time
After the mountains and the forest and the meadows
there is the river ferry going across sunlit water,
Ah life is easy now I am on the water
and not on land, the other side of the river
always has that hesitant promise about it,
even though the pears are just as unripe over there!
Beyond the glide of orchards, the bus
cranks down into the little town of Cattewater,
with its spiritual swimming pools, its lapidary merchants,
its neglected gift shops",and at the top
of Greenfingers Street -the Dreaming School…
All around the Dreaming School is a cool fence
and I am soon enroled and being scolded to sleep
in my bedroom by a handsome bare-legged woman who makes me
think
about sex and draws a curtain over the afternoon window
with her big-thumbed hands and says, 'you are not the first,
thunder boy, fresh down from your mountain.’
'Is this my first dream?' I stammer. Smiling,
she says, 'the feeling of mountains lasts well
into the forest, the rain only falls for a moment and then."
From Poetry Wales Vol 29 No 1 (July 1993)