Your serve was never great – often out of control,
every other ball would soar so high and plummet
For my mother
On Amwell Street,
the dairy has been locked up,
abandoned carelessly,
as if an earthquake or volcano
exploded, and not just the decades,
and now all around, slow gentrification.
Damp years of junk mail
load the floor, cool as the milk
and the ice-cream which the signs
still promise can be carried away.
Wholesale boxes of chocolate bars
and crisps are balanced on the till —
brands and packets that till now
I'd never even noticed had disappeared.
In the departure lounge, the sky
fades to dark, the colours running away.
When the lights go down I’m looking out
over the wing, the arc of the land.
We fly past dawn — beside me
the guy who’s carried on his whole
case watches Macy’s parade on TV, and waits
sleepless, for his quick get away. We’re almost there
before I’m awake, fixed to my tiny screen,
the channel with the blue sea and green land
and a red crayon seam to be sewn.
Skirting past Saint John, the furthest non-Alaskan tip,
hovering at 38,000 feet
the cartoon plane is out of time, pulsing on,
reappearing further than Lake Moosehead,
Timmins, Montreal, before dipping south — city
by city the eastern seaboard,
Boston, Providence, falls away off the map. Oslo,
Midtown – the hotel windows
are narrow eyes, taking in
the high skies and the bare brown brick,
early, before the day time haze,
the almost ice, precise glint of the glass;
November, already
the wind and the cars and the honking
near misses are chasing each other
down the avenues. The moon's a wink.
At every traffic light, the same man,
pale neon, white blue:
held together, so many dots joined up, elusive
and dependable, waited for; half his life's
a blank: a dark transformer board
above square digit fingers, a red hand raised,
a ‘no’ no one ignores, falling away to
dayglo pearls, an angel without wings,
gelatin silver, an almost friend...
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