I
I do not know what station this is, or why
We broke our journey; checked, here in Derbyshire,
One senses danger, disquietude only.

Pieces of smoke litter the huddled town—
Card collage on felt; no pattering movement
On roads of sliding newspaper, sidling dog.
No alighting or descending the steps of its drizzling doors.

II
Rain fell like a drizzle of fine slag
On an anonymous town in smudged Derbyshire.
I counted sixty chimneys in a quarter
The size of a burgher’s courtyard, wondered at smoke
Sliding edgeways through the dawn’s widening slats.

A flock of pigeons dissolved in the viscid air
Like a piece of mud in a current; 5 o’clock.
A streetlamp craned its neck for the spreading frogs.