Awake and away,

The breaking January day;

The vapours danced

And turned their warmth on him.

Before the staff had roused;

Stepped from the quiet house, 

As a hound raced ahead,

Nosing the scents the night left.

Marched the drive to distant gatehouse,

Where a window glowed with 

A hearth coming back to life.

Tenants unseen, most did slumber 

As he slipped the bonds of responsibility

And turned west, up-valley, to the fringes gladly.  

Wended through the village, the baker said sadly,

“It’s in the air, Sir, a’ feel it in the bones”.

Leaving him he pulled up his collar

And followed the March Stones.  

A mile or two upriver

The walls grew in stature,

The forests closed in like a winter coat.

Nature some well-versed actor;

A cock-pheasent took fright.  

Turning from the foresters’ track,

His ascent by ways of the deer

Curled around the glen

To some lofty, lonesome den.  

Below it all opened,

Like the sleepy eyes

Blinking in confusion,

As the gloom lifted

And the sun began an anaemic arc.  

The companion implored him to rest

And both curled into frosted moss,

Drinking in a scene both bleak and blessed:

A frigid artery though the valley,

Spectated upon by skeletal plantations, falling

Precipitous, spilled like capillaries into the morning.  

And so the moments passed, 

Fallen deep into sweet reverie

When hence came the far clink of a pail

From across the way; 

Wrought back to the cool of the day.

He mused on this delicate spectre, 

Some other’s kitchie-deem,

In another parish, another Master.

She paused and gazed out across the stage, 

As if to catch a distant eye in the audience;

Unseen, amongst the birch woods

Where she dreamed of her escape; 

Unaware of the contemplation she met.

A life, unbeknownst, was mapped out:

Arms linked in the polices, 

Conjugation in the dying firelight.

He dreamed his situation away:

Fallowed ladies’ chamber, 

A hearth, hitherto unlit.

To elevate her from bondage,

To plant flowers the coming springs; 

A portrait to hang above a fireplace.

Elegant, raven hair, tied up neatly

Freed from beneath the grimy bonnet, 

A broach, demure upon her breast.

A clatter of metal and from his dreams was wrest,

And back into the warm cottar-house she went.

Marble bones felt the ache 

In a reel between his longings and the cold.

It took his eyes to the northern skies 

Where curtains of silver were falling in concert.

Moving languidly across the plateau 

Between the Firth and his seat;

Shuffling Boreas, pallid auroras.

So taking to his feet he would race the snows 

Back to the House,

Penning a lament to the cold therein.