In the seventies
there were dozens of cathedrals
in the desert. Meridional,
unfinished projects
gaping windows
money embezzled and lost,
the wind racing over
whitewashed walls and through
the sockets of windows,
rattling piles of unused steel.
This change is a sprint
on a geological timescale –
new relics, footprints floating
off the tarmac, thickening
the atmosphere. But
sitting here, a billion Canutes
before the slowly rising tide,
sweltering as the mercury
creeps upwards, we begin to
inhabit myth, our smiles sticking
like the flat trace of fossils
in basalt. I take a walk in the slow rain,
this laconic cloudburst, almost
somnambulant. There is a bundle
of bottles, all pointing inwards,
half damming the river beside
Hartcliffe Way. A car showroom,
other low-rise warehouses clustered
close to the road, at the base
of a shallow valley. In the re-use shop
I look at an old mirror,
badly painted pink, it swings
all the way if I nudge it backwards
and has lost most of its
orange wax lining. It is
splitting into the air, It is
fixed to this place here,
on sale for one pound –
no wonder, it looks shit.
But, in another second split
from this place here, I am
walking with it to the cashier,
thinking that I will keep it
till the monsoons drench the land
from Porthcurno to King’s Lynn,
which might not be so long.
When they do, I’ll be sitting
in that other place with my crappy
pink mirror I bought for a song.