Walking past Neville Street

Screwed to the eyepiece of remembering,
it's yes to the Cancer Hospital, but the streets
were not so pristine in those days,
the bomb-sites more a census of stray cats
and anthracite to blacken handkerchiefs. 

Bringing your life to see its early self's
an accidental problem. Walking to a garlic-
infused restaurant will not prepare you for
the labia of Avernus, or the little clock
so plaintively assertive on your wrist. 

You came in here, a true provincial,
unscathed by horror and yet knowing it,
with all the mothers of the Empire singing them-
selves
to sleep. On a verandah someone is still staring at
long days ahead, deciduous pilgrimage.

Diverging Lines

Dementia, the obituary wrote,
forgetting dementia is a name for life,
a standing on the only
as yet undiscovered planet. 

We had been collaborators,
two friends who rarely met in later years,
caught in a similar accountancy. 

Once, he'd given our family guinea-pig
a home, and, as a photo shows,
a pretty grave in Somerset. 

We both believed in flying near the sun,
a heat which somehow I found cold
but which he dared come closer to,
the better, I now read, to fall in ice.