A line from where

There’s the picture on the big church ceiling
where the older fellow reaches for the hot young thing.
Got it? Well, forget the picture and focus on the fingers –
after all, it’s the gap that stays in our memory.
So, their fingers don’t touch and the sky shines through –
what does that make you think I wonder?
(Rhetorical question by the way.)
It made me think of our fingers pointing
that imagined day on the soft-sand beach
pointing together
pointing to the sky
scratching a chalk-white cloud line across the chalky blue.
Two heads, two hearts, two hands, one line.
A line from where to somewhere
A line that never ends.

Taking down the decorations

In the Gardens the last of the decorations are being taken down. An upside-down Santa’s face leans against a chipped two-dimensional reindeer. A child screams from its fur-filled buggy. Bright yellow men are carrying, just, a slab of decking as wide as it is long. For some reason there are seven men on one side and four on the other. Nobody watching is surprised when their path, from a straight line towards the gate, becomes a graceful, then lurching, arc into an iron-railed corner.