Pale ankles in the mountains, divergences
on a quarry. We are witness to it
land and witness to it
some fact of further summer
or things a truck driver might say
                                            ‘Ossa ashiver
                      and no one knows why
speaking, coughing: it is a throat, after all, writing
poems is nothing like gladness.
Take posture, gesture from the rib
how the body is – it is hard
here shrubs heave like lungs, the young
men fly in, flown in quarry throat-deep folly
so it happens. Black glass
of the vitrified brain, in the earth-shaft
critique in pure resin, boiled stone; no time
is ever resolved and still we find it
in ore, grate it as glass, itemise it as
sand, grind it until it’s suave as paste.
A poem hardly written.

The phrase ‘no time is ever resolved’ comes from a speech by Jeanine Leane delivered early this year in Cambridge.