The tram threading silver
            through a suburb I’ve never seen,
bracken mulched at roadsides, blossom-drift
            through woodland navy with shadow.
            I have shaken when examined,
            I have remembered old anaesthetic.
I have hated again the sliver
of ceiling and the sliver of eye,
the round overhead light an apogee
borrowed from a million films.
Every time I remember the fear
            I’m remembering it a bit worse
            and that’s something at least,
the night metabolising,
the scalloped silver edge
of a balloon in the ward when I woke
up and how it just was,
dreams uncharted
or uncharitable.
Every bodily threat, every node
            or asymmetry hinges me back
to that nonplace like a bend in the forest
            and now you’re ringing me, why?
I can hear your electric orange nail varnish
            and the lamp on your desk
            with its lengths of blue glass,
segment or carapace of a lacewing being
I have yet to meet. It is some regular
time of day, it is 1pm or 5pm,
            I had no right to feel groundless
on foot in the carpark exit earlier
            (the only way out is through
            a wait of embered headlights).
You are asking about poetry submissions
and I can’t believe it,
the whole day there beyond me.
A white umbrella out the window,
a man carrying a microwave
down the street.