The Poetry Society Celebrating our centenary

The airbus engines hush their steel-choir

drone, turbos blur to visibility, wheels

risk a kiss, get tactile touch-down

at Perpignan: its saffron streets

and firefly cars, its runways flaring

below our wing, its southern

night exhaling light.

 

 

Then the autoroute's static

of French DJs, its Babel

of rock-music and rising heat,

our map spread across your English knees,

the politics of the wheel between us.

 

 

Headlights unfurl rock, scrub pines,

flat-tongued cacti lolling where a border guard

waves us past stalled lorries, loosing Spanish verbs

from the bored threshold of his world

 

 

Catalonia fills the car with sea, dust, acacia scent

and death, each moment of spiced air arriving

through rolled-down windows to wake us;

villas balanced on cliffs, hillsides quarried

from the roadside, fishing boats far out

from land lamping a squid-ink sea.

 

 

The coast road spirals to the village,

its houses shuttered, its narrow streets'

nocturnal life serene with sleepers'

unpronounceable dreams.

Gossip is banished from cafés,

the church emptied of praise,

though dawn's thanksgiving

already glimmers on pantile roofs.

 

 

In ten years Castillian has vanished;

street-names lose us in risen Catalan

until the car fumbles us up a cobbled hill

to unlock the flat's terminal heat, shower,

then taste the sudden sweat of sleep.