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Love will be slow then as girders crossing blue water. The boy in the corner of the carriage
clicking his beer can will freeze. A change will adopt us like snow on the tail of mauve April rain
slipping soft fingers into the workings of hawthorn, the gears of daffodils. As dreams, we are
unseasonable, chilled into a locked van. This train derailed, its spine dragged to oblivion.
Pillars fall for ever, fail to find ground. We have grown into our suspense: a bridge of dissolve.
There is no jumping from this span. On the flat of the bell curve we maintain our notes, hold the chord.
Inside the machine house we watch the oiled brass members lift and push against each other. Their habits are plotted with fanatical clarity on creased charts in wide cabinets. The draughtsman's hands are bones, but the metal skeletons prance in swirling gowns and spit thin coffee coloured grease. The great crown rotates with mindless severity, trapped in its ceremonial. The beam nods and linkages faint and revive as the hysterical governor tugs the weights and levers. I clutch you, and point. A climax is approaching: the valves clack and hiss, the needles tremble higher, fierce shudders run through the handrails and up the fluted shafts. Will the iron fruit drop from the capitals? Will the whole burnished temple collapse? But the rumble slows and stops, the trundling belts fall silent, and something escapes with a sigh.
The world was not cold car seats smelling of sick, was not all tough and rumble, studded footballs on the side of the head, tremendous thunderclap teachers, giggles of girls behind pointing fingers, the boy with the torn nails and ink tattoos who said he'd get you next time;
no, the real world was papier-maché, green flock, lichen, cork bark, points (left hand and right ), buffers, loading gauges, level crossing, signal boxes, grey stone plastic platforms where the passengers waited, each on a round transparent base. The policeman stood with hands behind his back watching the car that never caught the cyclist who in turn would never catch the dog (and there was no creature smaller than the dog). Beyond the Hardware Store three inches of corduroy ploughland led without warning to a vertiginous drop. Sometimes a giant screwdriver lay in the High Street like a stranded whale.
Nobody complained. The children never went to school, were never beaten. One had a hoop, another had one arm: accidents will happen. They didn't cry. They had a church and rows of neat white graves but no one ever died. The only things that moved were the sparking empty trains that jerked on their orbit past the fixated guard with his green flag, the mother and son, the weighing machine.
Shouts from the street were ignored for this was the world that you, alone, created, tore apart, restored.
Stern, thoughtful, on your chair across the ocean of carpet, the stacks of paper on your lap and clustering at your feet, the TV making hysterical claims you tap your teeth with a pencil and turn the next sheet.
I watch from my corner blinking over my book; the lighthouse rays swing like propellers and rarely coincide in a huge flare of brightness.
At dawn we caught each other in passing a taste of smoky tea. We carried each others' souls in our bags among the folders all through the furrowed day.
The night collapses onto us like a tired child; a slow embrace becomes fast compensatory sex that joins and immediately separates;
I lie in the whispering dark and contemplate the fine curve of your back and know I would have this world no other way.
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