Echoes

A light goes out.

I drive:

I pass an athletic and symmetrical young woman on a bike,

a geeky looking young monk in elaborate robes,

tourists from the far east,

cast iron bollards,

dreaming spires,

autumn, spread across an affluent town

like effluent on the steps of a dining club;

and none of them feels a dimming.

Not one of them feels

the slightest diminution of the light,

and I feel their indifference like a fist.

How can they just keep existing blankly

as though that extinction were irrelevant,

as though it were just

that your daughter should grow motherless?

A light goes out.

I examine all the desert places once illuminated,

moistening and salting them.

A light goes out and it is wrong

so fucking wrong

that shade does not fall across

the whole blasted heath of my sight.

It is wrong that

the girl, the monk, the tourist,

the bollard, the spire, the leaves, the slanting light

fail to see how impoverished they are

by that casual circuit-breaking.

A light goes out

and I want to bellow.

This is me shouting your name

wanting echoes to slap back infinitely,

but the future is bottomless,

and swallows all reflection like a greedy child.

Cambridge, October 2010