Gateshead Revisited

She takes me to the rust-winged Angel
rigid on the hollow hill:
cold feet above an empty hearth
where snow burns brighter than the coal
that failed. These are not miners' lamps
but semaphore of sunlight
on commuter windscreens: messages
from one fossil fuel to another.

Let's pretend she's real: her name is Lucy
and she wants to glide with arms outstretched
for no purpose other than the poet's whim.
It's the kind of day when love, as abstract
as Gormley's sculpted lines, commemorates
the sweat and claustrophobia: the romance
of grinding, dark and dirty, at the face,
like cunnilingus under a rock duvet.

There are no tracks but mine. No sword
of flame to bar the Gateway to the North:
I am cast out alone and tell you lies,
for Lucy is as much a construct
as this Angel I have only seen on Google,
this generic snow with which I dust
the scene for fingerprints left by a hand
that never grimed itself with prehistoric carbon.