Port Lympne 1986 Poem by Simon Foulkes

A last tourist climbs the massive stairs
French brick cools to evening chill: I
Am alone with the Moors, and step down
Over geometric lozenges, through glass doors:
The Marsh is spread small in the glorious airs,
Towered, hazed, tasted on my breath:
A fact, a fiction, a deja-vous, a distance
Closing on me like a tiger, roaring nearby.

The sea snaps at the Wall: imagine
The water-breach – gouges, pours – then
Smears the plough-marks, blood-water clots
Mats, heals, destroys the event
Slowly, stealthy, unseen: so all
the little selfish scabs of land are smoothed
to one great mirror of the vast sky.

I breathe out a patch of token warmth
Lost, lost in the dying air. Breath
To breath, fact fades to fact,
Each extreme the same. A shadow
Turns the key in the glass doors, and
All I see is the ochre of the lights
dotting the coast road to scratch it on the dark:
One long arc of something there.