The Space…

Inside track

I lived in that other yellow place,         
for fifteen wet years.         
Locals called it ‘The Mental’         
though I wasn’t from those parts,         
nor were any of my people         

who never found the gates.        
There was a long wall, so tall         
it was hard to tell what kind of day         
had fallen in among us.          
I suppose the place         
was warm in a foolish way.         
I knew every stranger         
wandering the scrubbed halls         
in black and white by negative         
held up to the known light,         
the way you can see what shapes         
are  there, and what they want,         
and see the shades         
that colour takes away.         
My favourite corridor         
opened onto spring apples, flower bunches,         
frostless lake-water, tyre tracks.         
Pill-trolleys-fronting-nurses         
prowled the wards for mouths.         
I stayed quiet when I heard         
their apple voices tempt         
the gathered snakes.        
The day’s texture was stringy         
as cabbage or a mother’s bacon.         
No two days were different         
except the day of the three swans.         
Near my long pauses, my walls of safety,         
lay the banging of pans, steel tray collisions,         
glass bottles chattering in crates,         
the sound of nurses humming to themselves         
like traffic growing nearer.         
I met everything before it came,         
and had it gone before it went.         
Those nurses saw us in shifts,         
eloped at tea-time in long coats,         
collected  by a green bus that never washed,         
it’s metal jaws held open as it left,         
even when winter blew shivers off the lake.         
I saw them through diesel smoke,         
stretched across the long bus window,          
like a queue  that never moved,         
looking back at us, not longingly,         
suddenly remote and homeward turned.  

         

Edward Boyne