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And thanks him, starting to walk off downhill
But looking back to find the stranger still
Observing him. Den, brunt of some cruel joke,
Calls helplessly “I was just up the pub”,
Then carries on down the long slope again,
Barefoot, skirting jewelled spreads of powdered glass,
To the T-junction at the bottom where
A single house stands near the corner there
Amid a great amnesia of grass,
Its presence making a stark absence plain
Yet with no clue as to whose residence
It is, its windows with closed curtains hung.
Beneath trees further on he takes a seat,
With freight-yards making the dressed set complete,
Where hunkered on damp grass he picks among
The lyric rubble of experience
In search of rhymes. The solitary abode
Stands punctuating the erased street’s end,
Closing a quote since lost to a mute past.
Lighting his cigarettes each from the last
Den lives and breathes and tries to comprehend
The dead man in his house just up the road,
That wonderstruck and milky gaze. He strains
At the idea of it; cannot begin
To analyse nor even quite define
How jarringly abrupt t
hat end-stopped line.
Life’s sprawling text shall not be bound within
The whale-boned Alexandrine or quatrain
But finds instead its own signature tread
