FROM THE FLAGSTONES 
 
This concrete town with no guts,
no grit where we can only smirk
as galoshered feet slip ‘n’
slide in and out our café where
exhalations of icy conversations
mix with the fog and cigarette smoke.
 
It’s a damp riverbank town
border with riptides
sneak currents
no watchtowers no walls
an escape for the committed
or reckless – the next country
a lucky swim away.
 
You draw down
panelaks, teetering like headstones
(that lost their plots
a regime ago)
pen in flagstones and millstones
flower tubs filled
with butts and dead dogs
tarted up with cans and stencils
subjects of your studies in pencil.
 
Nature’s only concession
(so far as I can see)
is this wedge like a warm slice of pizza -
four fall trees jutting out of the bar
where dogs curl up in corners
and mist pushes in fishermen
selling trout -
 the toxic confetti
swirling around the passing
procession of Saturday weddings
dragging monochrome trains
drawn into this twilight
fugue whisked by an accordian player,
guests laughing back at us
while you’re smirking back at them
cocooned in wine and tuica
almost  lost in your sketch
smudging *** ash for sky
dreamy with relaxed fatigue
of travel and infatuation.
 
Your pad’s our field dressing
that could work for a while
before the gangrene sets back in
so I’d like to amputate this souvenir wedge
for my scraps book.
 
I watch you listening out for the shanty
from the flagstones – about weeds
delicate, green, undamaged,
muscling through the cracks
in the concrete
drawn up to the cut where
we also look effortless and a little green.
 
Tomorrow we head for the border
and only one of us can swim.