Bane

by CLIVE McWILLIAM

Wolf phones me from a train late at night

lost between northern towns at the end of the line.

I hear his head buzzing

against the window as the train slows down.

Who is it my wife goads from behind her book

and I wink and laugh too heartily down the phone.

A jolt in wolf's voice as he jumps down

from the carriage. Then quiet, but for the sound of water

running away and the dry bellows of his breath.

He sends me a Snap so I’ll recognise him again. Scratchy.

Button-eyed. His face fills the screen like a giant feathered cat

that’s been knocked to the roadside in the rain.

Tonight’s stars have gathered around his head,

teasing and chattering in the dark.

He bats them away with a wing of his coat,

pans the plain of broken glass and rough sleepers about him,

an island between a groove ploughed by tankers

in the river sludge and light seeping from the town.

You still at the same address Gordon?

His voice like clinker as he curls in a scrape he’s made

in the sediment of glass and needles. We’ll sleep for now.

I walk twelve thousand steps around my chair in the night.

The carpet crunches underfoot.

My wife turns in our bed above me.

Morning all at once in the rain, a cry of the gate and a reek

like the farmers have been spreading on their fields again.

I feel him in my gut as I button my coat.