I’ve been on the case since dawn. Even now

my men are sifting the woods, bagging up

small bones like flutes. Some report messages

in Gaelic; others find evidence in caves

and clefts in the rock. There are claims

that larger primates turn their ears to them,

and children open their eyes from the cot.

Listen again to the original, amplified

and slowed — now: do you hear that?

The syntax is of no taught mythology:

it has darkness in it, and slow beats,

and intervals shaved finer than ours.

From the oak and holly, in the wet leaves

she utters it calmly, again and again,

across distance, close; a voiced tambourine

trembling the balance of the inner ear.

I’ve had to suspend all routine operations,

be-rhymed by it, chanted down

by the common secret messenger,

given over to the history of woods

where so much is buried, where her gullet

disgorges layered codes of stolen land,

flung momentary lives, instances of slippage

from unmarked files gone to rags in leafmould.

No public benefit, admitted, in saxon crime,

but under the clearing to find that final note,

the unsolved sudden rise — I’ll nail that yet.