Here in the old
Enchantments
you can find remnants
of her still,
her smile a ragged
and torn tarn shore,
her perfume
the come-gone scent
of slapdash rain.
Her workshop sits
a burnt out husk
tucked among the
West Hills covered
in glinting starlight frost;
her experiments lie abandoned
the beaker glass still shattered
across the dusty floor.
Her eyes glissade
the wilds now
and stalk the stony foothills,
trampling down the heather
and snow covered
barbed wire fences.
Her lifelong question
yet unanswered,
What spirits sway
the briery bush
to comb the depths
of corrie lochs?
At least one biographer
has claimed she died
taking her lifelong
studies with her.
But her radio rests
not too far down
the mountain slope
in the basement of a ranger station
where from time to time
it picks up something,
ancient equations
the wardens think
so they set a man
to sit and listen,
gentle words being
spoke and wrote,
translated into
a thousand shades
of sense and scent
and meaning.
The broadcasts dwindle
come the winter foil,
but some subsist
beneath white static blankets,
feasting on ghost apples
cold and clear,
ask-gasping
answering
the question of survival.
