the kitchen window


Coming home from a factory job
3 bus rides and 7 miles away
the sky darkening into the upside
down cup of evening. I walked, bag
on shoulder, uphill to your house,
where you waited with your face in
the walls, in all dimensions, expecting
to return to us, as water will return to
a circle. But before all this I was picking
plastic bottles from conveyor belts and
packing them in boxes, their different
coloured tops laid in such a way that
an eye looked upon me as if blinded by
the boredom of machines. And if I cried
out then as you do now, what would we
become, the hierarchy of angels would
have blown us to pieces with trumpet
breaths of brass and valves. The curtains
didn’t lie right, turned up at just one end,
dust and sunlight freezing us to who we were.
How can people come to this, an echo in
a locked room, a Breach of permanence
contradicting Image. We have become
each other, an argument in ourselves, a
vague reflection in the kitchen window.