The Black Mirror | Steve Ely

 
William Torksey had a lot to lose; turbary,
fishery, decoy, sheep. He loved the cranes
and wintry wigeon, the warp of the whistling
inland sea.
                   So when the Crown conspired
with Amsterdam to expropriate his rights,
he sought a second-sight wench to prognosticate
how he might defy the schemers.
                                                         The Widow of Danum,
bold Bill and the Hatfield commons, trekking
the waste to the scryer’s well on the Lings
at Brierholme Carr. Stags fleeing before them,
crashing through blinds of high phragmites.
Terns wittering overhead.
                                             Sphagnum sink-sump,
cotton-grass quaking: bow down at the fen’s
black mirror—jet meniscus flecked with dust
and midges. Something chewed or eaten:
the humming of bees, in the air, in the ears,
the dry cave of the larynx—needle-shriek
of swamp-gnats biting. The men stand back.
Low spoonbill honks and shears away.
      One-by-one from her bosom they enter
the pool and vanish—askr, tade, grig;
the men press forward. The charm they may not
now or ever repeat.
                                  Dark pane breaking,
releasing ignis fatuus—the wraith of the Magus,
formed from the wyrd-hole’s smoking water:
Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?
The men shrank back; the scratching reeds fell silent;
William wept his sore distress.
                                                      The wraith waxed wrath,
and the waters trembled: Wherefore pleads thou
of an Israelite, and not unto the Philistine lords
unto whom thou has sold thy trust? Thus the fen
shall be dried and put to rape, and thy head
struck off and spiked in the halls of Dagon;
and all of our posterities will shrivel like the peat.
      William fell to his knees and implored him:
Is there no relief for the widow’s son?
The vaporous Magus rippled in the wind:
Four hundred years will the Dutchman’s drought
afflict our shrinking land—then it shalbe
as in the days of Noe; the heavens will roar,
the wild seas rise, and the aegre rage in Trent and Don,
breaching the banks and wrecking the sluices,
gouging the sewers and drains. Rivers restored
to their loops and braids will flatten across the level,
drowning the red-leg partridge barrens
to swan-land, grebe-mere, pike-rich fen.

      William bent in van Valkenburg’s rape.
Joan on her knees on the Yorkshire stone, scrubbing
for de la Pryme. /ˈstiːvn/ stares at his dark reflection,
a skein of bugling cranes.