Where you weren’t known, and far from what you knew                                     – Seamus Heaney I step offroad and down into wetlands: waist-high moor grass, sandpiper tracks, hillocks of whin, manure. All day the only sounds are winglap, buntings, whooping swan, grazers clustered lowing toward the lake’s edge. None bother watching me. I’m so relieved by this, exposure limited to sedge. The seepage on my boots feels kin to salve. Out here I do not anger you or please you, the sky opening its solitude, the expanse of marsh enough to loosen tenderly the story of us I always wished was true. Like a dried damselfly in yellow tormentil, a dead curlew, I leave it and come home to you.