Jumping off bridges
You hoped the river
Made of glass
Would easily divide
Around your bird-boned weight
A fall, in mirrored rising
To a prayer’s clasped point
Almost as long as the world’s held breath
Shoulder turning
With that immaculate
Block and tackle inevitability
As if the curvature of the world
Were real, not just the lying distance
Where earth and sky collide
Where curves in opposition meet
In the wind-rush shout
A sun-pale flash of your smeared face
Realising, the world, neither curved
Nor made of glass
But, fragmenting apart
You are
On the train you hold the waxed-paper cup
In two hands, careful, as if you caught
A butterfly
With seesaw determination, as the carriages shunt
At the points, where the rails diverge and intersect
In that clumsy, stagger back way
You always thought unnecessary
A summer cold is just past all sensible belief
(you say)
I think how you mantis, turn
The taut, wrung out cloth of your neck
Outside, the hard, enticing glint, as the river passes
When you return, careless this time
With another cup, held at a clumsy distance
Like the besmirched paw
Of a particularly embarrassing child
Shadows lifting from your back
I consider, the isthmus of your face
The changing half-moon light
Where the sea erodes
One day there will be
Nothing left (I think)
The way sometimes, in our peculiar distances
All details are effaced
But for today
When you tilt your head
To better catch the trip-trap of the rails
The silt of time
In the hawkish, estuarine rake
Marks out the familiar, negotiable terrain
If I only knew the legend
I would keep the map
But, instead, watch the run, of unevening colours
The roads becoming flood-torn
As the paper soaks
The spilt tea from the tray
The journey only ever takes us
This one way
Crumpling, with that mildly sneered distaste
We are lost
