Your trees, the homesick and the swarthy native,
blow all one way to me, this southern weather
that smells of early snow:
And I remember
The house closed in with sycamore and chestnut
fighting the foreign wind.
Here I will stay, she said: be done with the black north,
the harsh horizon rimmed with drought. –
Planted the island there and drew it round her.
Therefore I find in me the double tree.

And therefore I, deserted on the wharves,
have watched the ships fan out their webs of streamers
(thinking of how the lookout at the heads
leaned out towards the dubious rims of sea
to find a sail blown over like a message
you are not forgotten),
or followed through the taproot of the poplar …
But look, oh look, the Gothic tree’s on fire
with blown galahs, and fuming with wild wings.
The hard inquiring wind strikes to the bone and whines division.

Many roads meet here
in me, the traveller and the ways I travel.
All the hills’ gathered waters feed my seas
who am the swimmer and the mountain river;
and the long slopes’ concurrence is my flesh
who am the gazer and the land I stare on;
and dogwood blooms within my winter blood,
and orchards fruit in me and need no season.
But sullenly the jealous bones recall
what other earth is shaped and hoarded in them.
Where’s home, Ulysses? Cuckolded by lewd time
he never found again the girls he sailed from,
but at his fireside met the islands waiting
and died there, twice a stranger.

Wind, blow through me
till the nostalgic candles of laburnum
fuse with the dogwood in a single flame
to touch alight these sapless memories.
Then will my land turn sweetly from the plough
and all my pastures rise as green as spring.