from Would Passenger Sappho Proceed to Gate 31
4
To leave you now’s to wave
out of a window under fortywatt yellow
into night that shades the squat concrete
but splits to corridors of headlamp and filament
darkening again to block and factory,
merging into the boatroad’s blackness
though the far bank glistens.
Then night gives closeness up for distance
while shacks and towers dawdle their coats on.
The fields invisible, you become one
in five million, as gasses gather to a sun
out there in the expanding vacuum.
*Alistair Noon has published several chapbooks, most recently Out of the Cave (Calder Wood). His first full-length collection, Earth Records, is forthcoming from Nine Arches Press in 2012. He lives in Berlin.
