Halving

There is a place I could feel at home
beneath a catastrophe of wires
in this white evening under plastic stars
I could feel all the warmth of the room
endlessly in glass in all its orchestrations and might
leaning through wet eyelids
with the valley held in frame despite
or beyond the singing shade where kids
parade in toiling sheets laughing there,
under the hills, under last year’s windows and black bricks,
the black earth with its island kisses there —
and in that place of tobacco and sticks
and seed-strewn avenues, poured at dusk,
filled with hosepipes, rag and bone men and musk —
coal-defined, small, so small, where the roads
turn before a regimented horizon
to take away the girl, to take away the codes
love ladles in, as the lovers run
taking the sales reps and their families
into the future deserts filled with flies,
into the son’s sour contralto cries,
beside the boiling copper lies;
there is a place I could feel at home,
with street names and clangour and dogs
locked in warm sheds beside a green lawn
and all the dread and all the wishes, knocks
and skirmishes, and wise hugs,
would leave us semi-carnal on the rocks
of a magisterial sea, the radio features there,
from a red summer and in that fine archipelago
of thin shouts one sleep would do me there,
one tiny sleep would really do for me and you.