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Prognosis The knowledge settles at the bottom of your glass. What’s left clarifies, divides the light. Clean white, which crosses the air unscathed, and this – water’s half-true cataract. In its arc the table’s dry laminate turns gold-dappled, warm, even tiles rise up to dance. Like a prism it drowns the ward in colour, albeit of one tan shade. How is it that outside bears no trace? A vaulted sky hovers as if on steel beams to clothe a station hall. Cars idle at the roundabout, nurses stride with great purpose from block to block yet nothing resembles this: how here the day transforms and slows, its swollen alchemy. Bedside, your clock mocks us both, pilfering with gloved hands from every hour, while time, stealing through your unfinished cup, lays itself down, the sun’s bright psalm. Before this dull image in the blood’s darkroom, you too pursued your tricks of the lens, drove so often from one station to another, in some unknown realm with your camera to mark the breaking of night or dawn. I could not see then, why a moment’s flux should arrest your gaze, or why with determination 6
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you’d try and snare each one for eternity. Now I look on as the rays unspool across your desk and feet, listen for coughs, how your engine lingers with lifted clutch, and gather up the spent threads from where I stand. It falls on my fingers too, this ravelling light. I wish I could glean it with more than hands. 7

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Prognosis

The knowledge settles at the bottom of your glass. What’s left clarifies, divides the light. Clean white, which crosses the air unscathed, and this – water’s half-true cataract. In its arc the table’s dry laminate turns gold-dappled, warm, even tiles rise up to dance. Like a prism it drowns the ward in colour, albeit of one tan shade. How is it that outside bears no trace? A vaulted sky hovers as if on steel beams to clothe a station hall. Cars idle at the roundabout, nurses stride with great purpose from block to block yet nothing resembles this: how here the day transforms and slows, its swollen alchemy. Bedside, your clock mocks us both, pilfering with gloved hands from every hour, while time, stealing through your unfinished cup, lays itself down, the sun’s bright psalm. Before this dull image in the blood’s darkroom, you too pursued your tricks of the lens, drove so often from one station to another, in some unknown realm with your camera to mark the breaking of night or dawn. I could not see then, why a moment’s flux should arrest your gaze, or why with determination

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