The Treaty at Iwuy

All week along the coast I chased ciccadas the lanky radio beat had found inconsolate, and having lost direction to the Brussels road whose spire I had mapped the headlights toward, I found a hedge stooped low enough to shoulder-height that roof beams pitch-forked up on rungs, and moonlight splintered through in golden flakes to glow where once a bomb had skidded down. The steam had popped the engine's trundle. A barn in disemboweled appendage warmed the devil moss, and feet my sleeping bag had parceled out now claimed with fire, equal lots of land. All night the rain had sung in distant riddles to the cratered earth beneath me, and where the fog's low wind preludes the lark's ancestral anthem a breathing dared my mind to wake. Above the croft like a tremor in the pestering rime that stammers the host of morning knelt: not the prince of manors marking limits as in distance a river flows or dwells, nor the scrivener's finger sketching trespass with a quill, but a bull with language so refined it swallowed sound, as if by mourning, it survived the world's occupation; a force of nature feeding off the land, the lord of future drinking from the well, reclaiming lost ground.