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Judy Gahagan

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Short Leave

The tight knot of week-in week-out would unwind
itself to a single thread, the road northwest,
re-spooling onto the lure of cobalt hills,
one way, as if we’d never need to be returned.

At the two-thirds mark, a ruthless stretch
where three lines, high above a no-man’s land,
no pull-off, turn-off, a snarl of roads to nowhere
we could bear to go to, would reduce to one- there

we’d see the choir of cooling towers: keeping abreast
of us as we veered pure west, pesisting on the horizon
as if they couldn’t bear to let us go. Each one
breathed out a slow aaah of exhausted breath,

seeming to sing, like heavy sirens, to us: don’t go;
you belong to us., not to mythic outcrops rearing
out of the auburn seas of bracken, in remaindered wilds,
where you’ll not find a home, there is no home,

where you’ll stare empty in mist at cromlechs,
sheep gawping from black slits in brimstone eyes.
‘You come too late for the Gods, too early for Being’
lost children of the hills you’d have liked to be.

Then the choir of cooling towers would fall back,
the sun subside drunk, flushed, behind the cobalt hills
now crowning the horizon, hills that would surround us
like friends, in the morning, for our short leave.

 


Judy Gahagan lives in London and Italy. Published in PLN, PN Reviw, London Magazine, Tatler, Writing Women, Sphinx, Stand. Three slim volumes: Poetry, When the Whole Mood Changed, Ghosting The Cities (Anteum’s), Prose, Did Gustav Monkton Ski (New Directions, NY). Judy has been publishing poetry, short-stories, translations and reviews with Ambit since 1988.

 

Page(s) 61-62

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