This is the House

This is the house

This is the house and there the domain
The guides describe to a people scattered.
Time is thinner now. In the elbow of the leat
Slack water turns a knot of leaf and twig
Held from the mill where the thunder is.

And they can appear, those who walked here
And those who are to come, marking on
The attentive air a grace unseen till now
But prayed for in the hour of life’s ending
For those coming and those gone.

The hands lift, the distant singing
Crosses the water, and the voices
Disembodied in their parts, join, turn,
Hesitate and flow towards the fall.
Ghostliness gathers. The wheel turns.

The stress and thunder of it, the rack
And strain, the crash of generation,
The hands raised over the stream
Hold in a chord all these things together
In the silence that is following us.