A poem by Ruby Butler.

By the time he reaches the margin
the light has thinned to something workable.
A rinse of colour the sky seems
only half-committed to.
The ground is stiff with the kind of frost
that makes every footstep sound deliberate.
He walks as if the land has remembered his name
for the first time in years
and is testing the weight of it.

What happened
moves through him like low animal,
still breathing but unwilling to surface.
The field holds it without judgement,
because judgement has never been
part of the contract here:
wind, rot, fox-cry, the slow economy of decay.
a ledger of small violences
no one bothers to audit.

There’s a hush in the hedgerow
that feels almost like listening.
The air, raw as cold metal,
flares briefly around his breath —
a pale, evaporating script
that doesn’t bother with meaning
so much as release.

He pauses where the path cleaves
into the open acres,
one boot heel hooked in the margin
as if permission were optional,
as if stepping forward required
some negotiation with the unseen.
In that held moment
his face works through something private —
a tremor, a slackening,
the faint recalibration of a life
recently startled out of itself.

Then, with the smallest lean of the body,
he goes.
The field receives him
the way the field receives everything:
without grant, without refusal.
A quiet taking-in,
like the unmarked fall of frost
or the steady, methodical return
of whatever’s been running
just out of sight all winter.

*

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