Compass

Being of Some Use

October morning as a rigid norm:
puddles, wet hedges, bit of a bluster,
hard edge of urgency, jacketed aesthetic,
sirens, flashing-blue-lights cutting, slicing
anxiety elbowing, muscling forward,
garbed up practicality cackling
gallows camaraderie,
whistling trolley off to theater,

pass the Maternity entrances -
and it still twinges how I nearly lost
Joe's mother, himself and twin brother
nigh fourteen years ago.
_____________________'Good boy!'
Joe's just for a blood test
takes three nurses, one daddy.

So, later, on the trundle through 'the sticks',
ominously enough to 'Great Barrow'
down Chester road, hawthorns Fall-warming,
Autumn coal-glow under grey gloom,
as within an endlessly extended fire-grate,

I let it run past me once again, C,
the bitter savor of our love-split tragedy,
without my two-year shields of rage or hate,
just soaking in the bleak futility,
finality, profundity -
________________to let skeletal time's
sand-clock's dark-dust trickle though fingers,
blow off the little heaps that line
still, upheld digits,
________________sort-of, since
in that hard-faceted world of rattle and clang,
I am driving, driving, driving on.