The Amphitheatre

I have tumbled down off the flood bank

Placing my soles against the roots

Of plants that anchor the steep mounded soil,

To follow a winding isthmus of sometimes-solid ground

Out onto the salt marsh.

Here, the sky is green and the ground is blue,

Or the other way about.

Or perhaps there is only water,

Above, below, seeping, audibly,

Making a mockery of the separation.

At the start of the bend, where the bank makes a wide curve south,

And the river breathes her fullest,

There was a man, on the path.

Green fleece, blue jeans, minding his own business,

And I stood to the side and minded mine

Until he was past, and I was sure.

You can see for miles up there,

Five feet above the tide’s highest reach.

The brackish river perhaps a quarter mile north, segueing to mud, to marsh,

The salt-water world lapping at the arced ripple of the embankment,

And beyond, flat acres of land.

But I hadn’t. I had not seen him until he was ten yards from me,

And the encounter, a walker on this lonely path,

Send me skittering down the bank

Where nobody goes.

The route, marked with greyed poles,

Does not honour the compass,

But takes me north none-the-less,

Towards the low water mark,

Through violet pricks of sea-lavender and bowls of cracked mud,

A good spot, I think, to hide a body,

And I glance south, and east, and west

Where on the bank, grass and wild fennel and purple salsify sway

In an undulant Mexican wave,

And I, alone in the amphitheatre,

Listen for the pawing of the bull

And hear only the seeping water,

A cuckoo calling over the hum of less distinctive birds.

There is nowhere, here, to hide the living.

And yet I did not see the man. I do not see the man.

Turning north, my face towards loneliness,

I walk on through pillowed sea purslane,

One stride, two, a third, determined, facing forward,

Show no fear, not at that suck of mud,

Which is no more than the wing of a bird,

Nor at that breath upon my neck,

Which is no more than the breeze, startled from sleep.

Show no fear? Am I not alone?

But I feel the prick of eyes at my back and turn mine south again,

And again see only the eddying green upon the encircling rise.

I can be seen for miles down here,

But it is only the egret, only the gull and the curlew and the oystercatchers,

With eyes to see me.

He did not have a dog.

It is a dead end, this winding path,

That drizzles into the river.

There is nowhere for me to go but back,

Or on, into the current and out to sea,

But turning back…

Is he the shape of a man, hard edged amidst the unboundaried marsh?

Is he the flash of movement, lunging like the wind?

Is his face right now so close behind

That I will see no more but him?

Or does he watch from the flood bank,

Patient as the harrier, who from the gods, sees all.