on this bald hill the new year hones its edge faceless and pale as china the round sky goes on minding its business your absence is inconspicuous nobody can tell what i lack gulls have threaded the river s mud bed back to this crest of grass inland they argue settling and stirring like blown paper or the hands of an invalid the wan sun manages to strike such tin glints from the linked ponds that my eyes wince and brim the city melts like sugar a crocodile of small girls knotting and stopping ill assorted in blue uniforms opens to swallow me i m a stone a stick one child drops a barrette of pink plastic none of them seem to notice their shrill gravelly gossip s funneled off now silence after silence offers itself the wind stops my breath like a bandage southward over kentish town an ashen smudge swaddles roof and tree it could be a snowfield or a cloudbank i suppose it s pointless to think of you at all already your doll grip lets go the tumulus even at noon guards its black shadow you know me less constant ghost of a leaf ghost of a bird i circle the writhen trees i am too happy these faithful dark boughed cypresses brood rooted in their heaped losses your cry fades like the cry of a gnat i lose sight of you on your blind journey while the heath grass glitters and the spindling rivulets unspool and spend themselves my mind runs with them pooling in heel prints fumbling pebble and stem the day empties its images like a cup or a room the moon s crook whitens thin as the skin seaming a scar now on the nursery wall the blue night plants the little pale blue hill in your sister s birthday picture start to glow the orange pompons the egyptian papyrus light up each rabbit eared blue shrub behind the glass exhales an indigo nimbus a sort of cellophane balloon the old dregs the old difficulties take me to wife gulls stiffen to their chill vigil in the drafty half light i enter the lit house 
['poetry']