Tall Grasses

From a distance, the Downlands mislead.
There, in tall grasses, you lose your bearings.
The names shift. Bostal. Cuckmere. Field of rape.

What I grew up calling: path, stream, wildflowers.
Something was at work in me then, loosening,
not proclaimed. But that was before you took me

to the thick of it, taught me that if a hawthorn
isn’t nipped by a sheep’s incisors at two inches
it will burgeon into bush, then carpet scrub.