At some point the city gives up and goes away
though you couldn’t say precisely where or why.
Perhaps it’s at the bridge over the motorway
though it’s not really, it’s more in the mood
of the buildings, half-hidden behind trees, disused,
and sheets of newspaper cartwheeling to mishap
in the long grass by second-hand dealerships
at this border where people are only moving through,
never from or to. Unless they live here, of course,
which in a way we do, although there isn’t a human
soul in sight, only, in this field a piebald horse
tied by a wet rope to the heart of dawn
all the way through to night and the night’s damp,
illuminated faintly, last time you looked, by a streetlamp.