At work in this building





This building is awash
in an autumn wind
where branches curl like waves

about to fall and surge up,
where kaleidoscope clouds
pummel the air with their turning

where the moon thunders by in its bowling alley,
where meteors like missiles
zip invisibly in near misses

while the dark centre of the galaxy,
the ghost hole that crushes and sucks in all that approaches
goes on sucking and crushing like a cosmic gullet.

Soon this craft will be sunk by time in a stone ocean.
Bricks slip from its side, slates loosen.
Rain trickles in from a window pane

or drips through the ceiling to a plastic pan.
It is being worn by the same forces
that wedge rocks apart and level mountains

but in its sheltering hollow
we know none of this,
walk obliviously in corridors,

labyrinthine as a rabbit's warren,
past illuminated pastel walls
as bland and featureless as marzipan.

They offer us no record of time.
The floor of slotted nylon tiles
is firm on its boards,

shows no sign of lifting in a sailor's wake
nor what abyssal currents bear us on.
We may not love but we live here.

Our roles are given and we need them to know each other,
would be lost if we met elsewhere
but here we play our part in a process,

co-operate like ants,
enact titanic ritual to the end.
Even as this vessel slowly sinks

its warmth is steady in winter,
as homeostatic as the human form,
a second skin to insulate from all that would terrify and subdue.

The waters of the world have not broached its boilers yet.
The fluorescent tubes give constant light.
We cannot even see the moon

until we enter an unlit room
and that moon is kind,
when watched outside its freezing flight.

We cannot feel the wind.
So why should we know that this refuge is fleeting
as a cave of branches in a battered wood?

Cups and plumbing pipe tamed water to our lips,
assist customs that we spin out
as if endowed with all the time in the world.

Cupboards hoard cassettes faithfully in our voice
until we come back.
E-mail lassos connections in absence,

distorts dead matter to electronic presence
as though the world's elements
were there for our whim,

the universe made slave
and not a bulldozer leaning on an ant's raft.
Right to the end of the day

it maintains us in this limbo
that is and is not life,
familiar as the human face,

where we stare at each other bewildered,
comforted by substance only,
yet knowing exactly what to say.


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