In the gutter, the dead fox
remembers grey light through the slatted shed
in the early morning, smell
of dead leaves, chicken bones, nettles.
He lies on his side, very neatly, facing west,
his fur all the colours of seasoned wood,
shadow along his back where the car hit him.
He feels himself stream through a garden fence
into a sunlit bed of yellow poppies

although he’s dead. Soon someone will come
from the nearest house, with a shovel. While he can
he pulses out a message to the children
on their way to reception class.
They stop and listen.

Rain on a summer evening, not yet dark. The storm longed for all day has trundled off to startle some implausible quiet place, ploughed fields and outbuildings, a shingle beach. Rain cataracts through foliage, jumps back up from a flat black roof, plays downpipes, hoppers, gutters, as if they were Benjamin Franklin’s glass armonica, liberty as melodious as love. A woman opens a window, stands aside. The man she loved for years, years later left, won’t now come back; she watched his coffin carried in the heat into the grey stone chapel. No bound flowers, a few embarrassed speeches, and quite late that song he once liked. His son will spread his ashes on the river. This rain upstream in Marlow or Oxfordshire reaching Barnes Bridge will swirl and sail him out.

This woman so short of breath no longer needs it,
like someone who was always short of money
but wins the lottery and moves away
to a big brick house with chauffeur and swimming-pool.

The air that hovered just beyond her shoulder
has burned itself up in the back-room fiery furnace;
like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego
she has been cast to the flames but not destroyed.

Now finally we see who she really is:
small girl skeetering down a hillside street,
young woman at an island festival,
her baby in her arms, dancing all night.

First the coffin burns,
then everything you recognised as him,
his hair, the skin of his hands, is vaporised,
two-thousand-degree unanswerable blaze.
The segments of his brain, that once lit up
an MRI scan, now illuminate
the brick walls of this kiln, which is creating
something new from the old form of his being,
since matter cannot destroy itself, but is

reclaimed. When you take the urn in your hands
and feel the weight of him shift, you realise
what you knew as him, what you woke beside at night,
is somewhere else, not as in afterlife,
but as in the cold air in the avenue
of plane-trees outside, the gold leaves darkening
on the grass, the squirrel leaping into winter.

Then in that moment everything he’s seen
in eighty-five years spills out from his eyes
into the winter air, like snow falling
steadily out of nothing, so the sky
has gone, and the trees are blurred, and the terraced houses –

school, and the days he skived off down the market,
the mountain village in wartime, scavenging,
his wife as he bent towards her by the fire –

all of it rushes out into the space
his consciousness has abandoned, till this man
is him and not-him, the muscle-memory –
chopping wood, carving a joint of meat – disperses

like snowflakes at night, into the neighbourhood
and beyond, so on a hill-farm a woman finds
she can quiet the ewe, ease out the twin lambs.

I am organising the service for the lost:
the Italian men from Glasgow and Clerkenwell
interned in 1940, shipped unescorted
across the Atlantic: for the men who tried
to swim and couldn’t, men who were holding on
till they couldn’t hold on. This is their funeral.

For eleven hundred and twenty-nine garment workers,
who told the boss there were cracks in the tall building,
were told not to worry and did, but went back up
to their sewing machines and cutting-out machines
and were working in noise and cotton-dust when the building
fell in around them, concrete and cloth and cries.

For the man who dropped out of the landing-gear
of a plane from Angola as it came in to land
at Heathrow. For his hopes and his ignorance,
his family and his courage and the moment
the undercarriage cold gathered him up
into itself and soothed him to a deep

unshakeable sleep. For the pavement where they found him.
Also for this woman present, with tired blue eyes.