Notes on a past country

Morning black-tied, coat furled like an armistice, walking
through streets of still houses as lost as a tree deprived

squirrel when all is mapped with piss of dog and rustling
hedges. Such a foot-fallen landscape of differences. His old

ghost trains shuffle in with shrill pig-eyed steel, spidering
skeltering lamps. So starts the long tunnel of remembering.

It begins with a punctuation of cemetary-bound bridges,
a quiet sentence of river slickening underneath. How her

school-walk hands held him knuckle tight along the brick,
a twist-wrist of words towing there and back, flotsam jetsam

days, ginned laughter, broken glass, her sudden flaunting sun
that always waried him to windowed waiting. An anchored

ciggy corner-shop, rough skinned trees, that salt-green smell
of garden green, it all passes by as if her dying makes her live.

Now in an impossible forgiveness of flowers, family stand, cormorants lined up thin-lit along a cliff above her shadow.