midnight cloudglow

You should burn some more fuel to post yourself on the spot.

Cruising down off the Cotswold at jct. 17, it's coming up midnight.

Black with the blackness of recent rain and the moon in its final quarter.

Yet not all so dark. Far in the distance, beyond the lias vale,

an orange glow lies over the orange lights on the Bassett ridge,

and it's natural to suppose

that the one must account for the other.

But later, about the time that the chevrons begin, this constellation

splits, the beacon-lights to our right, but the cloud-glow moving sharply left.

Of course, it's Swindon's fountains of light and bus-route,

these thousands can colour the sky;

Bassett is just an outpost.  The living hours accumulate

all that reckless consumption of getting by daily,

the seizure of our long rich projects,

and shoot it up into the night-clouds.

The glow is a paler orange drape all round us,

since now,  we've come off at jct 16

and we're driving down parades of light, with regular

roundabouts, and everything is quiet in the way that towns can be quiet,

with the few late cars, and the foxes barking in the broad verges,

and in the homes the blue flicker of filmed action,

and the steady glow of smartphones

presenting tiny aspirational flows of light,

capsules of being belle of the ball,

imagined just the way it might have been in the days

before we were timesliced. A drinks-can rolling round and round in the carport,

and some late couple, walking the foot-way from somewhere,

as if from innocence.


These unremarkable hours

after the poem is over, when life and its congruent roads mock,

as with phosphur, the belleship breaking on the black, wet alarm.

Who can live long in the ormolu way?  And brutes, you know,..