The bus pulled out of Shoe Town,
its diesel breath thick on the April air,
and I watched the fields lean into Brixworth,
a name that still held the shape of her,
brief as a foal’s glance,
her voice already turning back to horses.
I’d walked home once from there,
seven and a half miles of hedgerow silence,
the road a ribbon of second thoughts.
Through Great Oxendon,
down Scotland Road and Patrick Street,
the bus hummed like a tuning fork
struck against the spine of the land.
I arrived early,
wandered the square,
read the names carved into the war stone,
Boer, Somme, Ypres,
each one a syllable of absence.
The slate plaque gleamed like a new scar
on an old body.
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The town once belonged to Rockingham Forest,
where deer moved like ghosts
and kings hunted silence.
Now it’s Georgian brick and pedestrian calm,
the steeple of St Dionysius
rising straight from the street
like a blade from a whetstone.
No churchyard — just stone and sky.
The Old Grammar School crouched beside it,
timber bones holding up the past,
its open ground floor
a shelter for market voices
and the weather’s moods.
I thought of Agnes Bowker,
the girl who maybe birthed a cat,
and Cromwell writing from “Haverbrowe”
as if the town itself had spoken
through his hand.
History here is a quiet thing,
a stream under paving,
a name in a ledger,
a corset factory turned council office.
And then you,
in the Sugar Loaf,
a pint between us,
me with Twelfth Night,
you leafing through Plath’s sketches
like they might explain something
the doctors couldn’t.
You spoke of devices,
of voices in wires,
of eyes behind glass.
I listened.
Not to the words,
but to the tremble beneath them.
We stepped outside.
The drizzle had stopped.
Birdsong threaded the air,
or something like it.
We weren’t sure if it was real.
But we stood there,
shoulder to shoulder,
and let it hold us
for a while.
