When words fail, go to the abbey
where the echo has faded, and try

to throw your voice over the water’s whispers.
Here, belltower speaks to bellflower,

the physic garden of sage and celery
a cloister whirring with insect vespers –

square-cut cells in rock,
the bourdon of bees humming
 
to their goddess the apple-tree.
This landscape, adrift and islanded,

has almost split the lake in two,
has boiled with craters, then cooled

to fonts of lakes and wetlands.
This spring, rain-blessed lavender,

the chalices of tulips, the iris’s faint candle.
Wine in the vine, blackbirds in chorus.

Inland, you look over organ pipes of basalt,
the dragon beneath St George’s Hill

extinguished in its pit,
under a ridge of oaks and smoke-trees.

Firebugs, oil-beetles, a shrine of glass lanterns,
the hill an isle of trees kneeling in the wind

by the blue-green inland sea.
A wooden gate carved with letters,

the lakeshore inscribed with reeds.
Now, pick up the pen. Begin.