The City

Your poems are a dark city centre.

Your novels, your stories, your journals, are suburbs

Of this big city.

The hotels are lit like office blocks all night

With scholars, priests, pilgrims. It’s at night

Sometimes I drive through. I just find

Myself driving through, going slow, simply

Roaming in my own darkness, pondering

What you did. Nearly always

I glimpse you - at some crossing,

Staring upwards, lost, sixty year old.

The crowd piles around you. You stand stock still.

Your face, under the green or orange light,

A desert Indian’s, wild, bewildered.

You want to ask something but you can’t.

You stare into every face

Trying to recognize somebody.

They ignore you. Then the light goes red

And they all surge past you.

Then you see me in my car, staring at you.

I see you thinking: ought I to know him?

I see you frown. I see you trying

To remember - or suddenly not to remember.