The glass weeps in this window near Waterloo Station and cold hisses on rails that loop away to Surbiton or elsewhere. Nowhere so ugly as in rain, bedraggled bushes of town, buildings leaking and looking their age, skies that are downcast. But there is something numinous too, shiningly implicatory in the out-there of roofs and streets.
Like the mad whisper of history it floats out and up from shapes even of shops: edging along walls like a cat its creeping luminosity of how and why and what.
William Oxley This poem is from William Oxley’s new collection Sunlight in a Champagne Glass, reviewed on page 24.
Oxley has published many books of poetry. A former poet-in-residence for Torbay (Devon), in 2008 he received the Torbay ArtsBase award for literature.
This poem is from William Oxley's new collection Sunlight in a Champagne Glass, reviewed on page 24.