Student Number 1002### (Apotheosis)

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There is a strand of hair that has worried
her all day. It was there when she
brushed it that morning, in the bathroom
mirror dripping with condensation, smelling
of bath-oil, tooth-paste, and damp walls.

She could see it in the rear-view mirror
of the car her nan leant her money to buy.
It's in every smeared reflection, even her
dulled shadow that follows her along the corridors
 that reek of bleach and urine. But no one else sees it.

All they see is the rain streaking the panes
and the nurse that is not really a nurse -
who calls gran 'me duck' - and the small hole
in the back of her tights where her shoe
has rubbed her heel red and sore.

The birds sing to the traffic and
the shuffling feet at the bus stop below,
and the relatives, sit beside the undrunk
beaker of cold tea, as awkward as adolescence,
and do not see that strand of hair, or the warmth
of her smile or how she quietly closes the door as she leaves.

And no one knows that on an afternoon like
this, of grey light and a hollow wind, that
for one moment, in a lecture theatre, she
shone with such brilliance that thoughts
crackled in the air and her words flamed
and flared around her head like comets
blazing in the night.

And, for a while, it was as if all the world
was black and she bathed those around
in the liquid, burning light of her questions
and the fire of her thoughts. And the lecturer
stood quietly, barefooted on hallowed
ground, entranced by the wonder
of such pure fire.

Two ROOKS in a DEWY meadow EARLY one MORNING

They rose into the air.
Oh my Lord...
How they rose into the air.

I was coming down from Old Lodge Hill
Boots heavy with mud, wading
A slough
Of sullen emptiness;
The church below me
Adrift in a grey mizzle sea.

When,
On ragged, tar-slicked wings
That flared with splintered fire,
They rose together
Into the air
Above the shrouded earth.

And if this universe
Could have contained
The three of us,
I swear...
Oh my Lord,
How I swear,
Right there and then
I would have stretched out my arms
And would have risen with them.

SHE looked AT me ACROSS the...

... dining-room table, her name, written in felt pen on a sticky label, that peeled and curled like a dying leaf on her lapel. In front of us lay plates filled with lunchtime fare and the corporate clattering chatter of a corporate building, boxy, concrete and glass and ugly in its sterility.

Outside the sea rose and fell in thick grey slabs upon the shingle and the sky was low and restless. A small knot of people were sheltering under the iron work of the pier and a gull hung upon the wind.

We talked about the papers we'd heard. We politely laughed in the way that two strangers laugh together. Her eyes were as bright as forget-me-nots and her relaxed smile enchanting. She told me of the session she had just run, how, at the end, some of the people attending cried. She was touched, but not surprised. She then told me about the times she had cried and I could read each tear in every line of her face.

After awhile, she looked up and smiled and asked me my name.

I looked at that smile and into those eyes and with an ice-cold realisation I understood two unshakeable truths:

1. I had no idea what my name was.

2. That the next (perhaps last) stage of my life would be to find it...