Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought  Percy Bysshe Shelley

Low slung August sun shadows stonework into 
deeper shadow lands — 
phantoms adrift on the wide Sargasso sea — 
and so unruffled, these lawns, 
and all this frumpery.

So much then has time 
and its opposite 
done for me.

It was along these lines that we walked, it was 
beneath these swaying poplars we kissed; 
and now memory passes strange lines of time over me.

All, all I can think of 
in your marbled hand so small and cold in mine, 
so much space, so little time —

and, as I board the National Express coach to Manchester 
and see the poplar trees sway 
and shift the shadows of that day away, 
I hear your voice 
whispering to me 
of the strangeness that awaits me 
in the darkness of the wide Sargasso sea.