CODA

In a black cab on our way to the ballet –

‘The Red Shoes’ at Sadler’s Wells – we passed

the munificence of St Pancras Station

that dominates the six lane highway

and then the removed magnificence

of King’s Cross set far back from the road,

and I was reminded of some of Moscow’s

imitative terminals, and I thought

how a railway terminus is like

a proscenium arch and the track

inevitable like a plot unfolding.

Terminus was the god of boundaries,

the guarantor of happy ends, as it were.

And Moscow’s land locked dénouements came to mind:

Berlin, Warsaw, Kiev, Ekaterinburg.

For islanders the world supra mare

is almost abstract, fictive, the notion

that the end of land might be days away

impossible to contemplate – like

the stage gone dark, the dancing stopped.