/   / It’s the concentration of landscape:  / Each trickle under every hedge  / Or stone; the flash and flicker of sunlight  / On the surface of a brimming brook  / That draws out minerals from peat  / And flushes through farmyards  /   / How, when it rains, the contours are made plain  / As filaments on the field’s hidden door  / Admitting seeps, sinks, drains;  /                 they say  / That if you want to visualise a tree  / In its true form, you need to cast the ground  / As mirror. Roots as limbs and branches  / Reaching down through soil, infiltrating rock  / Cracking open stone as boughs break in the wind.  /   / Water here is taut, stretched, wrung-out bundles  / Strung out through the web of pores  / Which earth is. Its tension grips and plucks at  / Sediment, sucks molecules from litter  / Entrains the stuff of landscape into flow,  / Becomes a flux; the catchment is a motion  / The casting off of skin, in water shed.  /   / Now stand here, by the Rivelin, skipping stones.  / Each kiss and kick of the surface scatters   / Light, every touching-point a mirror, or  / A doorway, concentrating landscape:  / Expanding the meaning of water.  /  /

Sheffield, February 2021