Required Fields

They can be timothy, these miscellaneous
undulating pewters we keep returning to.
Up to a certain point, they can be a breeze.

The number and month between 'Hey Jude'
and the student riots that a corridor in El Paso
was filled with yelps on your behalf? No sweat.

A combination of the last four digits in a line
long disconnected and the name of the border terrier
that met its maker under an artic? At a stretch…

But this? This is one memory too far, the reliquary
of an anorak’s afternoon mislaid doodling cul-de-sacs
for halfwits who omit to save on record all the facts —

such as you. It’s getting on. The last red asterisk
has begun to shine. Perhaps at times it’s better
to submit to the pin-drop of forgetfulness,

accept that there are questions of provenance
no amount of empty boxes can hope to answer,
leave the past to time itself back to a Square One.

Ours is stored this weather
in outsized plywood cubes in a warehouse
off one of the ring road’s quieter exits.

We Mapquest to it, postcode to postcode,
a Grade A grey day the kids are still at grammar
and sift the flotsam of an old life shipped ahead.

None of it translates. The antiques mall maple,
the see-through tubs of Crocs and Cargoes,
belong to a blank we are moved too far from now to fill.

A chap from Blackpool who works the forklift
ushers us into the office for something warm.
His mother always swore that she’d go back

and he brings the Kawasaki on the ferry twice a year.
First night he likes to climb the scarp,
three sheets to the dark, and shut the turbo off.

We sit there nursing Typhoo and plastic bags.
This side of the water, whenever he can’t sleep,
he stocktakes stars above the Turf Road, the Windy Gap.

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