Name
When you grind light you get the colour of a glass of water placed by a bedside in a house you have not visited yet. Which you drink. Things still have qualities, but over time colours dim, apples dull, discourses corrupt. By not looking right or not at all, we lose folk-names, tree-attributes. The train I sit inside is showing me the tall, carpark-squared Science Park where years ago I helped dig out a small Romano-British settlement. These mud-and-daub huts are not even left as stains. I saw them circled in the subsoil and wheelbarrowed them away. The moon of fable follows the train as we glide into morning, streetlights scattering like enemies on the plain. A man leans over my left shoulder and looks at my lap, inconsequent paper with pen moving. Here is the wet station platform on which we do not alight. It is the page the person opposite you read through the night. Leaves fall from air but we seldom catch them: transcribe them as flight of rooks across the windscreen of a dark-windowed car. I am written out, time is not sensible except as felt.