At Bewl Water

I am in the garden of oast houses,
late Spring and Spring late this year-
a slate-grey day of slanting rain.

I could do with drying-out
like the hops they smoke-dried
inside those conical evaporators
coiling to the apex of a cowl.

Kent is a sponge today.
I squelch through pummeled mud,
looking for soft hours in the hard rain-
uncertain and alive again;

like a man on the verge of sex,
primed with wet anticipation,
filled with the stir and flap of gusts.

This is Bewl Water in the High Weald,
and I am free for a day,
glad for the grey vista of hope.

I am a fisherman again, looping coils
through fingering thrills,
whipping lines in muscling air.

Let rain slash the curtained sky,
sheet the billowing wind,
infiltrate my skin and bone -

this old connection thrums the blood,
shocks the split sinew
when the sunk line volts the moment;

slits a throbbing frantic wire
pulsing from flashing bloated depths
up calamitous nerve-endings.

I live this dying struggle:
each boil and churn ignites my torpor
at the rushing centre of now.