Flowers and Dust 1987

I leave the cemetery
with a hole in my heart
a pocketful of orphaned buttons
and some half-remembered lines
from an old movie

Sat in a blackened car
between my uncles, their lives
furrowed seams
etched in coal dust,
we shift-pattern the faces
of passing years

In the Co-op tearoom
licensed for today
I am shouldered
by my cousins, no longer
the tom-boy in goal, tolerated,
or the quick-fire counter
chalking up back-door darts

In this village
of rivers and dogs
and the echo
of cobwebbed clocks
the world is a litany
of lanterned landscapes

I sleep with memories trapped
in the draughts of windows
and doorways,
in the lintels
of stone that uphold
the turn of seasons

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