To sit on a milker’s stool in the entry

to your cottage, with the fallen carnations

and Fitzroy’s bitumen smell rising up like a cordon

between your disposal and your neighbours.

Here we are in fame state.

You turn the man in mustard trenchcoat away unmoving,

an interrogation on your constancy in this place

of a mode, this tableau of the spectres of Fitzroy lighting

their swollen heads lifted from the gutters

to haunt and doorknock once more. And would trams stop?

The storm of yesterday evening split the beech

at the edge of the garden beds, its slag remains,

bar the black stick, a vermiculate wool blanket and sparrow fluff.

Some are left that chirp above in the alcove

between gable and outside; frozen, you turn the man in mustard

trenchcoat away, this time snagging his shoelaces

which tangle through the hodgepodge paving of the sentinel’s station.

You’re an ankle-snapping dog in lieu of a dog leaving its catch

to blanch and encrust in the sun, and little wants burial.

Your mother says you look like a whale carcass, though to hear her

would mean to hear her over the din of Radio Fassbinder,

colluding where gas colludes,

replying where those whose abidance in silence is not revolutionary.

From the radio ebbs places confirming your stool

before the stoop, deaf to the fall of carnations

and the rising mists of roadwork.