Wish you were

Men are tearing up the pavement.
They unearth Roman bones, sometimes treasure,

sometimes just the dirt
on which all of this is built.

We pick our way through debris. I show you scars,
bombsites and brownfields.

You buy a postcard of boobs
disguised as cartoon mice, send it to yourself;

you were never sentimental.
You stare at skinny girls, with their mascara

and period clothes, their chignons swept into nets,
drenched in their own storm.

I know how they feel. You want to see
Cockneys, a coat of whitewash.

You have monuments of your own.

Weather

You ask me how I know before the first fat drops fall from the sky. When I was nine I broke my wrist and all the kids in my homeroom signed their names on the plaster cast. When the surgeon sawed it off, they came away too, forgotten now. I stared at the pale arm I’d lost touch with, like something dredged from the bottom, like the face of the dead president furred and flickering on the TV screen, like the first snow witnessed by the grandmother I never met, blinking in the cold sunlight of a new country. I feel it in the air, in the hairline of my bone knitted whole again  –  that ancient thing which will go on without me.

Siberia

They are drinking tea from the samovar
and he is watching the steam
rise from her glass, the way her lips
move over its rim.

She takes from his outstretched hand
the tiny creature caught in amber.
The colour of her eyes.

She says, if you listen to the snow
it's like your heart shattering slowly.