Poem for 2021

Tin mine at dusk

In the Tinners Arms in Zennor I met an engineer

 who said he owned a tin mine, and would I like

 to see it? We drained pints and drove off, me

 following his car in mine. There was a scramble up 

scree at dusk and I said a stupid thing: we’d better

hurry up, it’ll be dark soon. It’s always dark in the

 mine, he replied. He unlocked an iron-mesh door 

and we dropped into the hole where Cousin Jacks

 had worked two hundred years ago. Our head

 torches scoped the descending path, which bordered 

a  sheer drop on one side: I dislodged stones into

the tinkling void. Then some grappling downward

through a chimney of rock and timber buttresses.

When we hit the next gallery we stooped off

horizontally and turned some sharp angles,

to the point where I thought, Already I am

lost. And, for some reason, I conceived of

myself in terms of molecules. Then the engineer

 did the thing he had brought me here to do. Turn

 off your head torch, he said, and I’ll turn off

 mine. OK? Ready? There. Afterwards, on the

 far side of the darkness, we chatted as if nothing

 had happened. As if, for a second or two, I had

not reversed into my own birth and dissolved

through the future, the cold bone-chilling

under my boots.