North
Beyond
the bowling greens of winter wheat
hedged
with hawthorn— beyond Lincolnshire,
the
landscape slumps north
past
freight yard pallet fires, and back gardens
hung
with Monday’s freezing washing.
A
scraggle-oak profile shoulders slate cloud,
and
pylons mark the distance west
with
cables, humming overheads
diminishing
to points of no return
trans-Pennine
or the Borders.
Our
seamless Intercity
blurs
by the mucky brass of stations
Victorians
engineered, their timetables beaded
in
biscuit brick, vaulted iron, and rock-face
skewerings
beneath the Norman hundreds.
The
pit towns, steel towns, the Tyne towns
forging
screw and funnel for dead fleets,
survey
zero in the tide and from it
sink
the mark to Gateshead’s Angel,
its
bloom of rust a reckoning.
The
underworld beyond the carriage windows
nudges
us awake: a girl, hair flying, on a field dyke
by
a ditch and upturned caravan,
mouths
something we each believe
we
understand, waving wildly as we pass.
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