Turquoise

By Sarah Wardle

Always a starting to the end,
reaching an island of pause,
never finding more than this
concentration on conscience,

the small difficulties of inner
ceasefire in a city of dreams,
the way days fold into each
other like museum postcards,

or an accordion of beer mats
inside a house of falling cards,
prophesying a future perfect
tense in a clause subordinate

to the main political concerns
of the day-to-day running of
the words behind the meaning
of things, always a sighting to

the last, like the geese arrow
of a fly-past, seen from shore,
always a beginning and never
a returning to the homes and

ones that have gone on before,
always this facing into a storm
on the flat edge of a knowable
world, which is yet unknown.