Reimagining Exits

(driving up the snow plough)

there’s snow left in the houseboat

and after a few warm summers it’ll turn

to a shelf of ladies compacts,

a veritable fading

as though the premise is somehow necessary to it 

and that “these significances” are living

in a different constituency to “my experiences”

(so that even the shaving foam can be marked a distinct historical occasion)

i think sometimes of a bridge burning backwards

in the salt mines of my Andalusian back catalogues

in the defenestration innate in every wind gush 

through an open summer window over each 

oak knot on my impending witch trial.

the oval room assumes a ministry of sad sounds

that play when a market town is looked at too hard

or when the sun rests just too long on their ironing boards. 

no. their feet come back wet with angel weep.

it’s not closing, it’s a way of seeing exits

as silhouettes on Scandinavian dashboard cams; 

they speak only when spoken to.

her eyes hold windows to an empty cinema complex.

i took a million photographs and disposed of the negatives. 

and sometimes when it gets really dark

i drive out to an empty car park just to feel a part of something

now that the snow has faded

and it looks as if the houseboat is here to stay.

(the blood thick on the paling sheets, lifting slightly as the wind picks up, through the window a puff of fresh laundry from the sleepy split-level, razed now. Fade out)