A little woman lies hunched upon a floor.
Her bones ache, she says. I'm rotting, she says.
She rocks. She rots, inside. Her body's damp
as yester year's fallen bough; it's hollow
and weak, but not with the softness of youth
and health. Her rocking accelerates
till the image is blurred; and the figure
rising to full height, groaning, some, in arcs
yet widening in which she swings pendulously
eventually an half-circle is reached.
Axles and con-rods bud; and, over that,
the sound of half-vocalised moaning. Our eyes
move back on a broad angle; and we can see
that she is part of a car being driven
across pleasant countryside by a man
with his foot down on the accelerator.
He has a smile. He turns on loud radio.
The woman's noise continues and increases;
and, above the sound of a broadcast, the man
hears a fault of peculiar symptoms.
He stops the car and listens; the anguish
near silenced, but ,immediately, not quite.
He opens the door and the pain sound stops. He goes
to the car front. The sun shines. He walks backwards,
away from the car.
Focus upon the man,
on to the torso, his chest and his head's
lower half. He has a respiratory complaint.
He wheezes. His eyes glint. The sun reflects
from desolate blue sea, each eye a small globe,
one of which we are approaching. We cross
the coast of Africa and head inland.
The course of a large river staggers across.
We climb and the river becomes a vein in a wrist.
We rise further and the whole of Africa fills
half our picture. Beyond the horizon,
the wall of a nose rises to occlude the sun.
Soon we've spanned a world, zigzagging, rising,
falling to make detail or take broad views.
Crossing the Irish Sea, we lose both height
and speed. We descend into moist clouds, with Wales
hardly visible, and out over scrappy
woods in central England.
People look up,
but we don't see; till, on an unlit road,
we see the flash of a small torch as a man
walks to his car, gets in, and slams its door
then starts the engine.
And our feet touch the decaying earth surface
of uncut grass and the dank fallen leaves.
She is turned and turned on a complex winch.
The noise of human distress is rising up.
She's spun quickly in his steaming kitchen.
She's swerved to avoid legs of police horses
and a truncheon descending. She rushes to grab
food from the back of a lorry; flailing her arms,
she spins, the propeller of an overhead fan,
wailing with hurt in a queue in jostles in a crash
in an argument. She stumbles on steep hills;
trees fall and crush the beneath bushes. Her too.
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