Only a long neck they said, born with or did it grow bend as she squinted north over sea sky pews perms fences maps expectations, and like the poet of the pearl-wearing era whose bare neck needed London advice she’ll find her own London dripping into an unheated typing pool, the ailing empire engine, musica industria, numb-handedly hammering acrostic bills, iambic inadequacies, receipts for nozzles, flanges, diaphragms, female-male plumbing attachments, the ha ha vocabulary of joinery, haven’t you got a boyfriend yet, dawn as drunk as dark as dusk, temp confidentialities, long necks like yours need 1980s pearl-equivalents, yes but what about swans, a boa of their own, black swans cutting diamonds through locked Mayfair ponds, the smell of another river where the murder was, her schoolgirl shout easy-oar or easy-all or easy-awe, plausibility is everything, she’s short enough scrawny enough as the oarless fifth to the four-part rhythm of muscle, limb, rudder-string, wood, water, gunwale, brass, blade, slide, feathering, is this belonging, her swerve around a floating blue-faced possum and Popeye the tourist boat wins a race apparently, winning means being thrown in, but the neck brace, unlike movies you can’t look up or down or left or right or back, it’s there where their oars drip, their landing leaving place, heaving up the wooden tub, the boys get leaner lighter sculls, diamond water dripping where blood was, reenacted, cop as actor extra audience, the drowning of, the dragging in, her feet stuck with blonde grass, the sweat-halo of stroke, bow, two, three, sliding towards her back again, peering over them, through them, she loved some of them, murder happens to wrong joinery, she’ll fly north young, return with a string of jet at her neck, the line between before and after, the accident we never talked about, at last the MRI, two effacements, blockages, C1 C3, proof part-architectural, part-redirection, her atlas rearranged.