Black Ambulance

At two the bawdy hums and slurs
            Resolve into a fogbank,

Garish yellow spreads, drones and clicks –

‘Do not operate heavy machinery’.


On bottles
Faces dip and loop, neon names
Like Spanish gun ships,
The tipping juggernaut
      Scraping a sign on the bypass
            That night.


Lovely jaundiced people double,
      Bodies sliding like icebergs,
            Slow
                  Hulled
                        Sides -
Gloriously touchable.

      And time is measured something by
            The snap of fingers
Closing on each other like fly traps,
Flanks shifting like ocean ridges,
      Basalt skin obliging.


While outside the window
      A shape slips, crouching
            Aside our house.
Reflecting briefly in the glass,
The Black Ambulance

The Black Ambulance.


      Catherine Woodward

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