the idea is not to strive to be permeable to everything to stand out of the shade and brave the fullness of the sun just as a fern conducting moisture becomes the river like a mother-whale on her four-thousand mile transit gives her body, bones and all, to the calf or petals thick and full like blushing faces jaundiced by the sun doing nothing though remaining star-like metaphors for beauty forget the lilies, we say, that’ s only what the mystics know fresh from eating locusts in the desert and speaking with demons on some allegorical hill we’ re harder people than that knowledgable about the sharp fructose scent of cow-shit on the late planted fields of barley, of wheat, and rape if we don’ t dig the lamb from the snow it freezes and we must draw water from the earth or a child thirsts to death forget what the ancients said about the providence of things this is reality; this is the substance living is made of and yet, like a film on our teeth, there is still some residue of Rome, and before, some glimmering of Greece the Iliad made, as it is, of all its scrambled fuss and now we cannot go a day without working for our breath now we are the captives of each hour and yet think of Patroclus, stealing the armour, and how Achilles, capable and strong as any in his time, sat idly on that white Aegean shore waiting for Thetis, his mother, to return from the shambolic centre of the sea bringing with her a breastplate, a bronze-headed spear and greaves with only half the cover he required