Â鶹ԼÅÄ

Your tee-shirt says ‘I ‘heart’ Zante’ and on the back

‘In Zante without panties’

Ìý

and I think of the trip we took after our exam results,

driving at speed in boyfriends’ cars

along the new M1 to Watford Gap services

for a frothy coffee, feeding the jukebox

and Lesley Gore singing ‘It’s My Party’

and the boys calling us their birds and us

preening our feathers and chirping to be fed,

how we used to before we read de Bauvoir

and Greer, before we burned our bras

Ìý

and I smile to think of a sixties tee shirt saying

‘I ‘heart’ Watford Gap’ but that was how we

cut the umbilical cord, severed the school tie,

travelled from schoolgirl to student as you’re doing now

so I know where you’re coming from

and I read your slogan not as a creed but as a cover up

for the myth of the sexual revolution.

Ìý

But hey, it’s your party now.

The river can take its time.

From above, lazy, washing field margins

in stillness of aircraft flight.

Ìý

And farms, flattened in patterned lanes

with minutiae of dotted stock.

Ìý

The river takes its time,

in no hurry to achieve the estuary

we shall not see.Ìý But then

an edge of land, shattered,

resisting the ocean that we do not hear.

Ìý

And the ribbon wakes of boats and ships

frothing the sea with its flattened waves.

Ìý

Maybe they see us taking our time,

brushing the canvas sky –

a contrail already erased

from where we distantly began.

The first thing to go missing was the beat.

The engine skipped and then stopped

in the middle of the sandy road.

Ìý

The next thing to go missing was the breath.

Hot and airless atmosphere

(if that’s not an oxymoron)

vacuumed life from lungs.

Ìý

The next thing to go missing was me.

Ìý

So who the hell’s telling this story,

this death valley serenade?

Ìý

It must be you

or him

or her

or maybe it’s them:

the chorus.

You know.

They’re always there