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At other times the sky comes down to the lake beside a wood beyond a cornfield. It’s a blue sky or appears so and it presses against the water. The water is plastic among other things. At one time, it would be ice, even the river, so thick the town skated on it and set up a fair with buckets of fire, figure 18 in an Introduction to an age of drama. You’re at the far end of this it seems. The little shovel is plastic too he clears the windscreen with before the engine starts first time. The snow becomes flakes like a simile and you manage to get there only stopping once to clear the air. ii That’s a feather in your cap you tell her. I can’t believe you said that, she says for the third time. You’re the poor and she’s the principal boy you notice not Maid Marion. You run for a moment through Sherwood with the harriers, Sunday morning rain or shine, never more fit or quite fast enough. The ambulance station doors are concertina blue and open like a horse race. The pirate radio is out at sea and comes and goes, like the landlocked lighthouse you set out to with your friends at throwing-out time, till just before morning dreams break in as you walk back. Back from the Derwent, oil-beautiful with rowing boats, the splash and drift, splash and hollow drift of slow-moving water, a level calm expressed as years; the cliffside handhold’s a hundred feet up and you panic, stopped, unable, until one way, then another, 67
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you talk yourself down ten yards, twenty, to a ledge, a path your eyes adjust to, and you can breathe, sweat drying on your back, back to a lane, lamplight and brilliant ropes of coloured bulbs in the park, where the night waits it out with ghosts and dust. Lit by laburnum you sit at the end of the bed of somebody’s grave, at one far side of town with a takeaway tea, in an impromptu or by-product leisure space, not getting the hang of me-time, Grenoside Woods behind you, like a job you drove to for three decades or three days. A latecomer runs in with flowers, colour to add to the year-round colour. Somewhere your aunties are sewing a white apron for science in big school in September. You won’t see them again until it’s grandchildren making that step up is it to chemistry labs and life-long language labs, a summer all-weather field beyond the furnace. Who could remember you better? Your hopes come back like a board game or marble run. You spent most of those years with tables of irregular verbs and if you never learned to make yourself understood, nobody minded. Laburnum is a tree, a small tree but even so a light-source and the bed it seems to shade might well be your own, or one just like it. The lanyard meanwhile is a badge of office. You put your head in like taking a medal perhaps even the gold, ok, not the gold, but you were there, fifteen minutes, long enough it transpires to look up, coming round to a sea of careful faces, listening to the music. 68

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At other times the sky comes down to the lake beside a wood beyond a cornfield. It’s a blue sky or appears so and it presses against the water. The water is plastic among other things. At one time, it would be ice, even the river, so thick the town skated on it and set up a fair with buckets of fire, figure 18 in an Introduction to an age of drama. You’re at the far end of this it seems. The little shovel is plastic too he clears the windscreen with before the engine starts first time. The snow becomes flakes like a simile and you manage to get there only stopping once to clear the air.

ii

That’s a feather in your cap you tell her. I can’t believe you said that, she says for the third time. You’re the poor and she’s the principal boy you notice not Maid Marion. You run for a moment through Sherwood with the harriers, Sunday morning rain or shine, never more fit or quite fast enough. The ambulance station doors are concertina blue and open like a horse race. The pirate radio is out at sea and comes and goes, like the landlocked lighthouse you set out to with your friends at throwing-out time, till just before morning dreams break in as you walk back. Back from the Derwent, oil-beautiful with rowing boats, the splash and drift, splash and hollow drift of slow-moving water, a level calm expressed as years; the cliffside handhold’s a hundred feet up and you panic, stopped, unable, until one way, then another,

67

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