I
Rooms so familiar
they complete themselves in me –
this darkened hall where the glass cases,
pent with light, are like train windows at night
taking the light with them into that long roar –
and I am waiting at the crossing gate
in rain so soft it is an easing of the dark,
surprised by so many small persisting sounds –
everywhere rain stepping leaf by grass blade down
into its earth –
as if to say imagery
is not invented. Even the simplest fact is
at each instant folding itself in light, is
opening out into false perspectives
the way in each glass pane the doubling image
of a relic stands farther off and smaller,
farther off and so far gone into a trick of longing
the night cleaners, bound to their machines,
with bowed heads pass modestly
among hallucinated corridors –

II
In the next room screens,
which all day dream a ship engulfed in light,
in the white burn of its engines, shouldering
massively free – and dream a ship
engulfed in light, as if to prove the meaning 
of repetition – overnight close in
the railway embankment where I walked as a child
into the holding place –
ground so dedicated to its purpose
it stopped existing between trains,
where the aniseed flourished soft plumes
in colours drawn out of shadow – out of
the sparsest shadow finely – and where the long tracks,
sheering off, held a sky-gleam chancily, like tension
in a green stick plied between two hands –
and close in the dispossessed places –
along the side of the house, in the dusty undermess
of a jasmine arch, wherever the sour ground is
netted with dank weeds – where I first called things mine
because they haunted me –

III
And because out-of-date technology
endears lost futures to us, among the screens
they keep a miniature Diorama – a foot-square box
that keeps Titan’s abandoned settlement,
its vaulted dome and gardens, built to scale, intricate
with fruit trees and mechanic streams which here unfold
less like natural things than like nature itself –
nowhere waste,
as if we had conquered here that feat of memory
which makes a whole world wait upon a small room –
where the figures, now they have stopped their clock-
work motion, stand amazed in a fall of light
like things newborn –
That figure with her back turned,
walking from the scene, is the Collector, carrying the relic
found in her possession when she died –
one of those glass domes with a backdrop sky, a sea
of dissatisfied small waves – its plastic ship full-rigged and
canting in the glitter storm.

Lisa Gorton