Was it worth all that time
The eye-blurring number columns
The hair-triggered ear tuned
To filter white nights?

That stretched toward red
Five years on. Sagittarius flared an arrow
Seventy two seconds
Across the dark

To tell us nothing
Contact details lost, no message
Whisper or shout
Perhaps already gone

Years later we angled our needle
Ten thousands calls pulsing out
Streamed Twitter in reply
Our inbox remaining empty

Forty miles
Pieced by gannet
The saint who never was
Keening through skirts of sleet
Her broken psalm
Against time

Forty miles
To jaws of gabbro , dark Hirta
Boreray, Stac Li. Towering teeth
Bird-crammed. Men spidered, scaled
Over a void where one fall
Could blacken time

Forty miles
The wheel spun, warping language
The world weaved on
Behind oiled womens fingers
Picking at time

Forty miles
Over sheened cobbles to the bay
Men and dogs taken last
Out of a mornings haar
To stranger seas in time

Walking to work
Pausing to watch westering geese
Cross the early tints of sky
Formation fraying from V to S
One day Ill fly away
Remembering another morning
They turned in air, downriver
Whilst you slept
My hand pinioning your bare shoulder
Lips kissing your nape

Horses are grazing by the field wall still
Here where you sit , the clarity of air
Brings watercolour  down to kiss the hill
Memory cannot tell me when or where
Loves pours out from your image. Love , until
Unbridled hooves through time might take me there
On horses.

In places which only the heart can fill
Be beautiful and young , mirroring care
Across a scene too far away to share
Before the wall is gone, then slow, downhill
Come horses

On the edge of light
At the final dream
You are always returning
My almost girl

Half apparent woman
Rising from the years
I live with your disdain
Your high-flown gaze
Your mad, scattered orbits

All you will never write
All you can never say
Step beyond pain
Pass on

My almost girl
Put back this unopened book
Half apparent woman
This binding cannot be cut

The line that brought everything
Took it all back
Sheepdogs, a mangle, a childs cry
Every year more stones dislodged
Forest inched over seeded slopes
Road lost itself a second time
Winters erased more
The crow mocked
Name and echo
Shrank into spruce

Last weeks
Beyond the lonely ice
Come to an end
Moons marshall dust
Above a face of
Chemical snowcloud
Before the last ****** plunges you
To the core of old age