August

There should have been time

but time went fast in the wrong direction

like each train view travelling backwards.

Whenever I closed my eyes

after the lightning that fused the house one night

the picture inside my eyelids changed

and the thunder that exploded a bomb in the attic

muffled my ears and hurt my chest all next day.

The lawn was pale as straw for weeks until after the storm

it sprouted patches of unfamiliar leaves

and the wren unwound his clockwork song again

under the flightpath’s expansive roar.

I went out and came home, went out and came home,

my memories of the city scraps of colour.

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I started to listen to my circulation,

to see my skull from inside: the eye-hollows,

the wedge-shaped bar of the nose. Away,

away! Time went fast and fear was set out

in inventories – leather albums of unnamed ancestors,

a chair-seat hand-worked with flowers glowing

the same dull pink as the hollyhock outside,

old jewellery’s metallic stench, folded certificates

and an undertaker’s bill for a very small coffin

lined in white silk, no funeral charges.

I got hooked on simulations of travel in deep space,

galaxies whose pattern unfolds while I move

among stars uncountable as human words:

to make death smaller, the nearer I get.

Fiona Moore