The Edge

This headland rears upward
into the spitting
and bluster of a gale wind:

A wind, like hate, that meets
the rise and rise of landscape into air.

Rising always,

pulling from the waves
the chalk bones
of a giant, a king,
the bones of a country.

Deaf in the whitening wind,
and whipped by hair
and feather spray, here,
straining just to hold the ground,
there is a salty melancholy
even in the leaning,

even in the rising heave of
vertigo and escaping,
in evaporation,
and in breath that burns.

Here is the line,
like a single dry and
fibrous blade of grass,
the cliff-edge, between bone
and aerial existence,
the place we come for coronation.

And these freezing tears
that the wind draws,
that make it hard to see the edge,
are nothing more than diamonds
for a crown.