The tin top cottages
should be haunted – but there is no ghost –
no made-pail Hoogstraten …/
First an eye-crash –
that was the quick blindness
which I slammed into –
it enveloped me under
a tugged-at gallows hood
as I ferried our slumped
kids through their unsettled fears
of the dark –
a risen thing …/
As my path-running dog bolts – yet again –
at the vertical thinning of grey squirrels –
I hear – and then see – those almost vermin
kids gather across the far side of the school fields …/
Believe in your child’s ghost –
but then let her spectre run
from the roadkill shock –
from the flare of the
body-struck headlights …/
Even in the unfair fall
of rain on the night – of
dis-charged un-loadings –
after our torches lit
this memorial bonfire …/
I am entertained inside her lento lungs –
travelling alone and partly dusk-blind –
within her low suck of cooling breath …/