We are out of milk for the morning
coffee. I walk down to the Circle-K

on Usher’s Quay, a quarter of a mile
from the House of the Dead.

Its fluorescent canopy inhaling air
disturbed by cars that pass louder

at this hour like rumours of a funeral,
even at night the station struggles

to breathe. I internalise its life-support
fumes. The clerk does not look at me

directly as he asks did you get any
fuel. Only the milk, I say. He scans

the carton; I tap my card on the pad.
There is no one else about.

My winter coat is wrong. It cowls me
with the weight of an old conundrum,

the accretion of denial upon deceit,
all the times I have told you I am fine.

On the forecourt by the diesel pump
I touch my wrist to check for proof,

some trace of a koan typed under skin,
that might explain the fritzing static in

my television eyes. Now as I reach the
river wall, snow begins to fall. I glance

back between the punctuating flakes
to see if the apron remembers who I was

before I came to this place of the living,
and of the dead, and of the midnight milk.