Palimpsest X - 126 Fagley Road

 

 

While viewing your old house on Google Maps,

I breathed the sinking stone of grief.

 

I haven’t stood beside your drive, perhaps,

for seven years, but still it’s disbelief

 

this leaves me with. As if I could return

to find you both in Sunday clothes,

 

or Grandad in his shed, or you just turned

to glance out through the kitchen window

 

to your garden’s summer length. But no.

That wouldn’t be the scene I’d find:

 

you’d tell me so. I wasn’t close

enough to workaday facts – to earth.

 

Even so, I still want to believe

I was – to feel the soft collapse

 

of truth that melds our lives in brief

and gilded visions. At the scale of maps.