Armada

the plants that, like him, never wholly took root.

One by one the souls of these houses and their tenants

have been undone by the fingers of bankers.

Among the debris where the religious lady wept

now only a sprinkler weeps. Those refugees from

the way things are supposed to be – the mysterious Pole,

the Italian students, the immaculate prostitute –

all gone from number seven.

Behind the window of number forty

nothing moves any more. How suddenly

that house lost its tongue! Within a year of each other

the old maids who lived there

donated their observations to the grave.

Like them, this street has grown secretive.

Glimpsed behind car windows bored children

are ferried back and forth, and are eaten up by doors.

Neighbours slip from memory, all their battles

and secret torments melting so effortlessly away.

Rooms are repainted, lavish curtains appear in windows.

This street has suddenly grown staid.

On the wall of the alcoholic playwright’s house

a blue plaque has sealed its fate. Alarm bells ring

too late to be of use. The street’s soul, stolen long ago.

Inattention (#ulink_f8f09e98-2946-5c93-a607-107a88c97516)

A child sitting on a doorstep looks up from his book.

In the room behind him a woman is writing a letter.

On the waste land across the street from him

a gasometer casts its shadow over a solitary lilac.

Like a little animal grazing over grass

he has been grazing over words,

stopping at the unfamiliar, the wondrous.

Over and over, as if it were a spell, he repeats the word cargo.

Out on an ocean phosphite clings to rusting propellers,

whales rise like islands, rain falls into nothing.

The shadow from the gasometer creeps beyond the lilac,

over the bindweed, the sweet-scented camomiles, the stray thistles.

And now the child has abandoned his book.

He has become the captain of a great ship and its cargo of treasure.

Sailors who’ve lost their sight report to him

on how the stars have vanished.

In the house behind him a woman is packing belongings.

Another book, an encyclopedia of regrets, is banished to its own space.

The shadow from the gasometer creeps on; a slow, irrevocable flood.

It leaves behind the lilac, the bindweed, the sweet-scented camomiles.

Juggling in the Crematorium (#ulink_f2b42784-1566-5d22-871c-f6d32247af6f)

Let’s get the balance right.