It was the start of the great fire, we were listing the minutiae the chair he died in, the trees, the neglected vines clawing at the window. I could not rid myself of the sounds. This is the cancelling-out, the striking of the work-house clock. Resign your place among the mannequins, he said out of breath in the crowd of lenders. Cut the engine now and everyone is in step. The scalpel finds its own way to the core, and its protege, the tomb is the rival of his master. We cannot go in the fields that flash in the rear-view mirror, to the throngs of the dead drifting apart. They sleep on fetid straw. The audience is now invisible, the reading committee suspended, and so we meet again, monsieur moliere, and the leaves drop away like notes falling from the ATM, in rock-shelter middens. We were always going to part here the lullabies that come between us. Where is it written the train stops dead in winter dark, because we have eaten our words. It was the impudence of a moment to stare you out, brushing away shards. This is unbreakable glass and the nearest running water is far away, bound for a circlet of pines and the invisible emptiness of the Irish Sea.