Calf-deep In Water At A Street Cafe This city once had a different name for years, the name of the General. No one wants to remember it now but you will find it when you least want to on old maps on the second-hand bookstalls cast-iron drain-covers, the back of the station. The streets are hostage to a darker time love-poems whispered on the back stairs not printed in black and white. Spring floods will sweep out the city's skull that grim dust on the air hanging in a thin sudden rain. A drench of sun blots the page. Downstream the old man's words form a foam on the coastal marshes below a branch of flowering blackthorn. Golden Goose How did we ever get here? A Chinese dragon formed in a mess of hot protostellar dust no field is home no stone is more than a shattered disc caught in the auroral storms of the second of September 1859, thrown from a train I'm waiting for a wolf in the museum café orbital motion of one arc-second per hour there's a prickle of fear out in the west galleries your sixth-form diaries, under glass in a dim-lit case Nain had to lose her accent when she moved to London "It was a terrible thing to sound Welsh then. Of course." sticklebacks in the petrol tank, the manager wants you gone epiphytic ferns on a sessile oak by the drover's bank Old Brecon Bank, mackerel lines trailed into the Oort Cloud fifteen in 1920, a generation missing a startled hare racing through the gap between tu mewn, tu mas, snooker on the telly we wed a river, iron filings rearrange themselves the palm of your hand was a map of the stars that lost map of the forest, the one that had no core I still need her to help me say Ystumllwynarth there's a bear in there somewhere, Arth, Arthur cynnu'r tân, the fire in Llŷn, we shall light such a candle now I hear the wolf breathing on my neck, bad pixels streaks and blobs and stress-fracture patterns outside the museum there is literally no atmosphere the near-zero chill of the trans-Neptunian plain, smoke in tongues and the wolf lies down at your feet curls around the rings that curl round your heart Rhiannon and the North Wind Flash-bulb bursts in a cloud of white magnesium. Chameleon and chemist, she has no need to rush. Setting sun on the Irish Sea, a gentle breeze on her back. 'Faster! Faster!' the Red King cries but never catches up. Horsemen and horses die in foam beside the road. Her spine is set in lightly-swaying stone. In emerald beaded backless dress and riding boots, leafing through a satchel of Dixie seventy-eights her shoulder-blades jut out like embryonic wings. Zeno and Newton join the chase. A bugle calls the hounds of heaven spring from cages on the A470. She hasn't broken a sweat yet, leans down to pluck a flower. Three nights the chase goes on, dropping in in relays. Rhiannon yawns prettily, sketches the sunset on her right. Men drop gasping to their knees in lush green Dyfed fields. In the darkroom the print is fixed and hanging up to dry but there in gelatin-silver she is still a frantic blur glass plates no more than men could ever catch her. This wild hunt decimates only the pursuers casualties are high in erotic metaphor. One little glance and smile behind, then on she trots. Philosophy of Travel is the annihilation of distance or the echo of desire even the concept of capital the birth of each new day and its death the pompous something of something else something you never heard of an alligator's song, a high-heeled shoe hung on a swamp fence, ultramarine the tinny whine that starts inside my ear if I'm alone too long or too quiet the money of love, the love of honey. Four hundred miles between, I study guide books suggest meeting one day in a cathedral town imagine the early starts and the last trains back the loafing of cloisters, the dunk of biscuits the ache and the treasure, the listening the little gifts, the brush of fingers you know I mean the kiss. You
Geoff Sawers’ most recent publication is ‘Silver In My Mines: Peter Hay’s work for Two Rivers Press 1994-2003′(Buffalo, New York, 2022). Born in 1966, he was only diagnosed as autistic in his fifties. He lives in Reading (UK).
