Your serve was never great – often out of control,
every other ball would soar so high and plummet
to the ground, whistling as quietly as a bomb,
the fatal one they say you hear or is it never hear . . .
 

before landing miles out. Second serve.
I remember how time after time, I willed it to go right,
for you to push ball over net with the softness
and precision of a kitten, the relief
 

of those occasional rallies. You small and hot
and reddening, as three turned into four o'clock,
flagging opposite streams of young diplomats –
all important friendships wooed across those warm weeks –
 

For my mother

On Amwell Street,
the dairy has been locked up,
abandoned carelessly,
as if an earthquake or volcano
exploded, and not just the decades,
and now all around, slow gentrification.

Damp years of junk mail
load the floor, cool as the milk
and the ice-cream which the signs
still promise can be carried away.
Wholesale boxes of chocolate bars
and crisps are balanced on the till —
brands and packets that till now
I'd never even noticed had disappeared.

Midtown – the hotel windows
are narrow eyes, taking in
the high skies and the bare brown brick,
early, before the day time haze,
the almost ice, precise glint of the glass;
November, already
the wind and the cars and the honking
near misses are chasing each other
down the avenues. The moon's a wink.

At every traffic light, the same man,
pale neon, white blue:
held together, so many dots joined up, elusive
and dependable, waited for; half his life's
a blank: a dark transformer board
above square digit fingers, a red hand raised,
a ‘no’ no one ignores, falling away to
dayglo pearls, an angel without wings,
gelatin silver, an almost friend...