Adam Heardman

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Recursive Lake

Colour hurried out of the afternoon.
Clouds jostled, directionlessly, the days.
Clearly a season was cleaving from another
season, but enough from each was left
in each – sparsely flung showers brushing
recently-sunned ground, birdsong
stuttering between tarmac and brick – to make
our movement through the year feel patched.

If there was a lake, and as I picture it
there was, it was scooped into an island
in the middle of a bigger lake, beyond
the shores of which the many thin
gold plaques of light on windows in the city
gathered, seeming to multiply us
where we stood (and stood), our exhalations
giving to the air its recycled future.

We began to speak these days,
exchange the usual grand delusions,
moving each other with the muddled gift
of what we’d shared, once, when we were ours.
I guess, again, if I could know it all
again, I’d know how to approach and bridge
the waters, archipelagos, inner spaces
containing other inner spaces. I’d know

what would sustain and what would breach,
what living in life’s recursive midst
makes near-enough unknowable —
that life has always long since begun
and is always still going on.

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ADAM HEARDMAN is a poet and writer from Newcastle upon Tyne. His poems have appeared in Berlin Lit, Propel Magazine, PN Review, The Rialto, The Moth, The North, and elsewhere. He currently lives and works in East London.