O, June. 

Profanations of a troubled sea:
twenty or so gulls wend their inimitable way
through the sky’s waxy gradation. 

Leather shoes, Anne’s lace and
the apple tree are saturated by
an unprecedented rain. 

Inchoate, night looses its black arrow 
along moss-green headlands,
the beck and its dimming hollows

those lofty threadbare paths
familiar to the crow and the courting doves
hitherto indifferent to the slackening sky: 

now head east, only east to crowns
of fir and pine that squint at the
refracted hearth of day.

April passed in the night
yet its rain persists.