Whatever went wrong, that week, was more than weather:
a shoddy streak in the fabric of the air of London
that disintegrated into pollen
and came charging down by the bushelful,
an abrasive the color of gold dust, eroding
the tearducts and littering the sidewalks
in the neighborhood of Sloane Square,
where the Undergrounds upper reaches have the character,
almost, of a Roman ruinfrom one
crannied arcade a dustmop of yellow blossom
hung with the stubborn insolence of the unintended,
shaking still other mischief from its hair
onto the platform, the pneumatic haste of missed
trains, the closing barrier
wherever we went, between fits of sneezing we quarreled:
under the pallid entablatures of Belgravia,
the busy brown façades that were all angles
going in and out like a bellows, even the small house
on Ebury Street where Mozart, at the age of eight,
wrote his first symphony, our difference
was not to be composed.
Unmollified by the freckled plush of mushrooming
monkeyflowers in the windowboxes of Chelsea, undone
by the miraculous rift in the look of things
when youve just arrivedthe remote up close,
the knowing that in another, unentered existence
everything shimmering at the surface is this minute
merely, unremarkably familiar
it was as though we watched the hairline fracture
of the quotidian widen to a geomorphic fissure,
its canyon edge bridged by the rainbows of a terror
that nothing would ever again be right
between us, that wherever we went, nowhere
in the universe would the bone again be knit
or the rift be closed.
