When I step off that doorstep, still in need of the paint with which I intend to lick it, and on to that short walk to the gateposts that used to hold up two wrought-iron gates but whose spines have become too buckled to hold anything more than the occasional blackbird, when I diagonal, across that familiar space where so many roads have laid and so many been buried, to the corner which saved me once or twice from the water pistols, onto the next street where they hardly know me, past the library in which I discovered those first poems and left the broken eggs of my own, when I lean against that road sign and watch so little happen to so few people, in such a small space on this minute planet, the silence made on the end of this needle, the centuries of years that let go like molecules inside the beads of water that slip unseen from the duck’s feathers, then will I rejoice, then will I squeeze out a kind of smile beneath my nose and sniff – this is all I need.