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CAR
DRIVE
Road
gripped with frost, with scarce and flinty nails.
The
engine purring, scorching at my shoes.
Eyes
going through (so okay limitless)
dark
with the car lid a visor, makes my head
of
that size too. Acknowledge
tree
shadow in cold moon, a tatty ape,
another
trier who didn’t make it, stalled.
Whip
up the centre over the centre’s eyes
past
three or four good cars with inside tied
plaster
casts silhouetted motionless
whose
head-cage circuits have deduced like mine
‘Tomorrow’s
mine; tonight—I’ll sleep tonight.’
Watching
the lights ahead nose down, and on
dim
stalks grow out of the coiled pitch beneath
of
road gouged round the Devil’s Bowl, and near
(dip
beam dip) me as they swing down the hill’s
catenary:
and I slip in from that one.
Give
it her eighty on the friendly dial
and
hold her on a line that she keeps well
around
and down the Hog’s Back’s anchored spine.
Leave
by the Cobham-Esher long lay-bys
inarticulate
tarpaulined trucks
that
from manoeuvres snore, the big red engines
of
Fair Grounds that their surgeons will switch on,
the
stately carrousel, the rocket cries.
Go
into London where the starting snow
falls
emptily around untended pumps
and
on my windscreen with an arc licked out
stipples
senescence, instant old man, wise.
Go
softly through it all now, street by street,
catching
the doorways and the window sills
by
burglar light in stony sleep awhile,
until
you reach your own railed area.
Switch
off: the snow is dark, the night is deep.
Slam,
lock the thing, go to the house and in.
Alan
Marshfield
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