TRAVELLING WEST AT NIGHT

I remember waking at the rivers
to see girders of gray sleepless bridges
appearing from sleep out of a current
of cold night air velvet with the secret
coal smoke of those small hours and nobody
on night roads the few words of toll-keepers
old complaints of gates and cables the bark
of bridge floors leaping up from under us
and the swelling hiss of a surface just
beneath us not loud but while it was there
nothing else could be heard except as calls
far off in some distance meaning that we
were already there in the dark country
before in the land beyond the rivers
one by one past the clutched hunches of sleep
the black country where we were expected
was waiting ahead of us on the far
shore unchanged remembering us even
when we had forgotten and then we went
on into the wordless dark beyond each
river thinking that we were going back