A Secret Water Flows

Grey day, half rain. From the windows at work, the world is not summer. A pale-light air of a February perhaps ten years old.
The calm, disquieted sea,
the cool air of the stairway.

(and time all messed up, tasting in the air of that stairway a sudden shift of last December, snow-cold days leading up to Christmas, expensive coffee table books about horror comics bought from Waterstones, the burnt-cardboard flavour that saturated December)

Walking home tonight. The cooler air. A resonance that could not hunted down. Tipping on the edge of memory, watching a shadow just inside an October-dark wood. Who are you? An autumn ghost, but which autumn, when?
No matter, these autumns are all gone and it is only summer.

Nearly 7:00pm.
Dinner is finished, and I think about night-time walks through unmapped streets. Dockland shadow, a path through breezy grasses into overgrown coppices, a fallen down house in the English-summer depths of the wood, repopulating the abandoned spinnies.

I pass houses where there are always room to watch an autumn rain.

Grey day fading.
There were no waves on the sea today, but I saw balancing engineers repairing a presumably broken street lamp.
Pianos.
Footsteps.
Sighs.

Bridges set to twilight, and the river beneath, dark water flowing to a sea I've only glimpsed.