Silent Night

When I write my great travelogue,

I shall omit London

except for a small chapter near the end.

Not to dismiss London,

others will always be there for that,

but because I seek elsewhere,

in codices, data streams, tesserae

and their accumulated echoes

of mindscapes where we should not go,

each footstep another world,

every second another closure,

too few repenting the loss   

of each and every wasted moment.

Silence, though,

suppose we met by hush of darkness,

the same old glade but changeling strange,

the only witness to our passage

a Trafalgar oak, horizon sentinel,

branches flung out across the sky’s ignition

like the splintering of glass,

suppose that this was how to slip away,

descending where blackwater turns to white

as it reaches for the salt

having touched springtime hills

 catching the cry of half the globe,

then tell me, if this were the last time,

Would it be enough?