Depot
Low-lying along the estuary
this fuel city. Devout personnel
contrive far from sight the refinery
of oil from tankers out of foreign wells,
an installation far from real cities.
No place of birth, no home of nostalgias
for chapel pews where penalties were eased;
no pubs or soldiers’ billets or high schools
dedicated to music. No one lists
its walk-way patterns in learned journals.
Across the land, reclaimed, a telescope
makes out, this side, sheep. Across the river
no common magnifying picks a shape
of any creature, although one gathers
there must be shifts, and crews inside those ships.
Beneath the still perfection of the sky,
the squat oil silos, dull white cylinders,
are safely over there, out of the way.
A tall tube-mast burns an unceasing flare -
not to be marvelled at - not vividly.
At night a hundred or a thousand lights
make this oil factory look like a live town.
It must have several grids of lonely streets
allowing access, where mute caravans
of forecourt tankers fill up and depart.
Page(s) 17
magazine list
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- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
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- ARTEMISpoetry
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- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
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- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The