GREAT RIDGE

           South of my youth a rampart stood

           against the sky dressed in thick skirts of oak,

           and on that long ridge's back the pines

           reached into the air to flag a Roman road:

           no giant-head-in-air but one that slept

           above the Wiltshire bottoms' spider web.

           And here Long Bottom came to be Tank Valley

           when, from wood-edge picnic where we singed

           our dampers over crackling sticks, we saw

           descending from the Ridge a pride of Shermans

           and we cheered.  That was in '43.

           In '44 I found a grey-planked caravan.

           It blocked a forest track.  We tried the door.

           ‘That's where the shepherd sleeps,' I heard.

           Locked tight.  And, tight as it was locked,

           the door became an archetype

           of secret life.  I dreamed.  And in my dream

           I stood in the open doorway with someone.

           She had no face, yet I divined

           that she was beautiful.  Our life was lessonless,

           we spent it like a costly wish beneath

           serrated fronds of oak.  It's true that no love since

           has been as poetically real as hers;

           it's also true that she did not exist.

           Nor was her name to be Jacqueline.  She was

           a succubus exhaled by longings and

           those ancient trees - like Venus never born,

           never to die.  The hillside mists had conjured her,

           high clumps of birch, thick bluebell beds

           and the wood pigeons' strange alarm.