Observations From The Bus Stop On A Blue Night

Here’s a thousand radiances:
Orange blinking crossing-lamps and rain-refracted headlights,
Across the road, an old hospital block,
A stairwell inside all lit up, white and empty.

There’s ivy eating the building.
It hangs thick, a dark stubbly rash,
Feeling out the bricks with blind tendrils;
To remove it would be to peel the concrete skin away.

He is holding me; he is entwining me in his arms;
He is ivy; he is not here;
He is memory; he is the ghostly gecko-pads of bygone Virginia creeper,
Intestine-roots clinging deep to mortar.

I am brick and glass and window and door;
I am a composite of the destructible.
Although I will fall apart,
in his ivy-arms I am
beautiful.