The Collector

Excavations under way at Hadrian's Wall

This wasn't found in some attic but down
at rock bottom like things left behind after
a modern death, limp neglected tat
in the hands of an heir, myself, collector.

What drives me into the depths is not a desire for
something, it’s little and insolent, picking up
clothes the dustman left behind - turned to uneven
paving, rain-stained - to know what it was like.

It’s scrabbling, chasing the vanishing,
people of the past, shards of thought,
sequences which lead to action – planning wood,

cutting out little clothes – moments long ago,
which really were and which are really
vanished till someone grasps them, reads them back.