The Collector

Excavations under way at Hadrian's Wall

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

It’s not the desire for higher things which drives me
into the depths, it’s little and insolent, clothes not worth
the dustman’s while, which became uneven, rain-stained
paving: just pick them up to know what it was like.

It’s scrabbling after the vanishing, people of
the past, fragments of thinking, sequences
leading to action – the adzing of wood,

the cutting out of clothes – moments, long ago,
which really were and really disappeared
till someone grasps them, reads them back.