The dummy lying by the petrol pump
as though its owner had been comforted
by fuel, its tang and taste, the way that kids
got dosed with tots of rum; the way I used to
lean into passing cars' exhausts and stare
down into dubs' unravelling of oils'
slick scarves - their dubious perfumes that made
you almost drunk. The way they almost looked
like old books opened at the idle coil
of Ottoman endpapers' inks, that's like
colostrum through the breast milk. As I drive
into the sop of snowflakes, book and breast

combine into a softened total, text
for Oldenberg to feed us till we sleep:
a pulp of puddle, cream and petrol. Here
the dummy seems half-pen, half-brush, a thing
for writing infants' epitaphs in milk
or, less morosely, those lost histories
of childhood: like the Virgin's robe, dropped when
Constantinople fell, these still fold round
the dumber fears that drive me now to seek
out comforts in the hypnagogic stream
of snow and metal. Metre must stand in
for home, and image for a woman's breast.