“They were quiet, he had finished explaining...
      so he turned, waited, then slipped softly between the floorboards.”

Eight o clock and pictures stalk
In certain rooms,
The battled retreats; Germanic graces.

While tone filters quietly,
Grey from dark, grey and yellow,
Gouged faces and familiar places.

Now cold tobacco slides its fingers along the cracks in the hearth,
The folds of a newspaper,
Curls up like a dog round the ankles of chairs
While the carpet and curtain bears
The stale ghosts of its last arrival.

At windows the street light drips;
Pools of greasy orange,
Yellow and then, and then and now

Grey breaks in the swollen gutters,
Sudden silver between the shutters
Of exhausted shops and
counterpanes.

The wisps of rabbits, quick and quiet
            Sift between the drains.

            . . . .

Someone is stirring here, see, between
The ashes spilt from throats of fires.
Shapes traced in soot, germs of red
Still clinging to a notion of iridescence.

Someone is stretching, testing his weight,
Teasing joints into place
Before Sunday must come,
And trussed in gold he must face
Congregations

Who ‘do not understand what he meant,
            Still do not understand at all’.

            Even after the rationale of the pictures
                  On the wall,
How God could cradle a blind thing
            That understood better than them all.
            . . . .

Now something pours between the grills,
Pours between the borders
            Of lines on roads,
      Bent bones of railings,
            The skeleton church and city square.

(that slice of silver across the grate, a flash of something)

A hair
      Breadth,
Strand of light in the seams of posters,
                              Aerials,
            Cracks in shop front windows.

And the scant footprints left along the borders,
                        Grey-white skim, a trace

                                    Of rabbit

            Streaking through the lines of roads,
                                    Of countries,
      Is all they left behind, an intricacy to follow,

                              To run with, vanish.


      Catherine Woodward

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