November - month of the drowned dog.

Today was such a day. It poured down as I drove across the fen to deliver a clock to a customer. The rain beat down. I took turn after turn and drove long, straight roads with deep drains at the side waiting to swallow the car if I skidded on the muddy surface. The signal for the sat nav on my phone disappeared and I became lost. This really is a God forsaken place, I thought. I rummaged in the back for a map and picked my way across country until I arrived at Gedney Hill, confusingly named as this is the flattest landscape you could imagine. It is also ten miles from the other Gedneys, Gedney itself or Gedney Drove End or Gedney Dyke. That did not help navigation in the slightest. Signposts were distinctly lacking. I felt a sense of unease. This landscape could really swallow you up! If I could find a sign to Parson Drove I would feel reassured. I had ceased mental speculation as to why a village should be so named. Eventually a village sign loomed out of the mist and the spray and I knew all would be well… and it was.

November

The month of the drowned dog. After long rain the land
Was sodden as the bed of an ancient lake.
Treed with iron and was bird less. In the sunk lane
The ditch – a seep silent all summer –

Made brown foam with a big voice: that, and my boots
On the lanes scrubbed stones, in the gulleyed leaves
Against the hill’s hanging silence;
Mist silvering the droplets on the bare thorns

Slower than the change of daylight.
In a let of the ditch a tramp was bundled asleep.
Face tucked down into beard, drawn in
Under his hair like a hedgehog’s. I took him for dead,

But his stillness separated from the death
From the rotting grass and the ground. The wind chilled,
And a fresh comfort tightened through him,
Each hand stuffed deeper into the other sleeve.

His ankles, bound with sacking and hairy hand,
Rubbed each other, resettling. The wind hardened;
A puff shook a glittering from the thorns,
And again the rains’ dragging grey columns

Smudged the farms. In a moment
The fields were jumping and smoking; the thorns
Quivered, riddled with the glassy verticals.
I stayed on under the welding cold

Watching the tramp’s face glisten and the drops on his coat
Slash and darken. I thought what strong trust
Slept in him- as the trickling furrows slept,
And the thorn roots in their grip on darkness;

And the buried stones taking the weight of winter;
The hill where the hare crouched with clenched teeth.
Rain plastered the land till it was shining
Like hammered lead, and I ran, and in the rushing wood

Shuttered by a black oak leaned.
The keeper’s gibbet had owls and hawks
By the neck, weasels, a gang of cats, crows:
Some stiff, weightless, twirled like dry bark bits

In the drilling rain. Some still had their shape,
Had their pride with it; hung, chins on chests,
Patient to outwait these worst days that beat
Their crowns bare and dripped from their feet.

Ted Hughes