One-hundred-and-seven-ish, she said.
They were changing it. Her apartment
was behind two other apartments.
Use their entrance, not their stairs.
The courtyard has another side.
Her biro barred the number. The seven’s little roof
stuck up above the ink. I folded her directions 
along a line that brought two streets together.
I’ll find it, I said. I know this town.

Among the austerities of our era
I missed the public provision of labyrinths.
The shopping centres tried. The car parks did
what they could: a few dim floors of where-was-I,
then arrows running down the walls to fetch you.
Get lost, they said. As though it were that easy.
Every direction excludes a world.
I went along the one she’d given me.

Her apartment sounded promising
only I wanted to get there soon.
Tomorrow was already burning on the news.
I wanted whatever was coming
to find us in the same room.

Evening unlettered the city. Upper windows
held the last sun up. I mistake illumination 
for understanding, because both make things easier to see.
How much of what I knew was only lighting?
The red bricks went one-colour. 

Under a lamp a web came up in silver,
wheel-spoked between a fence and a sign.
I shifted: nothing. Half a pace back: a street map.
A moth struck silk. Leg after leg, the spider
read the disturbance, then went straight across.
The victim kept supplying its address.

I’d been on the other Web, the modem
negotiating through its teeth, my window
wearing the screen’s cold square.
PREVIOUS. RANDOM. NEXT. A ring of silk-workers.
Her hand arrived in instalments: wrist, then thumb,
then cloth held to the light.
The dark had detail. It came down in strips.
Her name arrived below all that.

I stopped at the Grand to change a note
and drank the change. Through whisky 
the windows ambered, straightened
when I put the glass down.
At the opening I’d recognised the cloth
before her face. Hold this end? She unpinned it.
It came away from the wall, a shoulder’s weight
of coolness gathering along my arm.
When the work was folded she took my hand
without needing it for anything.
Outside she kissed me. I walked home
with a red thread caught in the button of my cuff.

The news was back. The music underneath it
told me how to feel before the statistics came on.
I left some sundown in the glass
and found a bookshop on the way.

'That’s Not My Apocalypse' was on the children’s shelf,
safe at the corners. Crater: flock. Cloud: foil.
The blue-fur sea lay down beneath my finger,
then stood against it when I stroked back.

That’s not my apocalypse. The mushroom cloud is too golden.
That’s not my apocalypse. The people have too much money.
That’s not my apocalypse. It happened before I was born. 
That’s not my apocalypse. The trains are still running.
That’s not my apocalypse. Its darkness is too well lit.
That's not my apocalypse. It gives history a shape it never had.
That's not my apocalypse. It was in my recommendations. 
People who liked this apocalypse also liked these ones. 

I wanted a last day without losing anybody.
Tomorrow is what the apocalypse
promises to spare us from.
The bookseller turned CLOSED towards the street.
I bought the book. I wasn’t sure she’d laugh.

By King Street it was dark. The car park wound
floor after floor beneath me. Rubber dust,
warm petrol-concrete. My footfalls got there first
and kept on going round the bend.
In years to come they’d take this building down
to give the city back its view.
I climbed the obstruction.
There may be no view high enough 
to explain life on the ground. 

The harbour took its lights apart. In a puddle
oil unstacked its purple into copper,
then green. A gull stood still in a great deal of wind.
Above me, the cathedral held its mended weight.
I could see nearly everything.
A window darkened.
I watched it a long time after that.

At a public phone my change went down in clicks.
Have you left yet? she said.
I told her about the drink, the bookshop, the car park.
I left out the apocalypse.
What can you see?
A window with the harbour in it.
Facing uphill? Good. Go back to the passage.
Not the stairs. I’ll come down.

Washing walled the gap. I put a hand
against a sheet and gave the wall a tap.
Light thinned the cotton. Beyond it was the courtyard’s
other side. She stood there, wet-haired, cross,
then laughing. I had brought the book. She took it
so that I could put my arms around her.

Her face had fully loaded. She looked at mine fading upward. 
I turned around. The left I’d taken outside the Grand 
was her kitchenette. Two ceilings failed to meet: 
we had a window. Her table stood in ground unwalked.
She pulled a chair out and a street came loose.

We sat. A ship went through the harbour gap
piece by piece. She opened the book,
stroked the fluffy sea against its grain.
You brought me the end of the world?
I thought we’d have time for it, I said.
She almost laughed. I remember it
as laughter. She put the book down.
Her hand came back to my neck.

Afterwards the building started something
down in its dark: a hum, a held-on note.
She listened. Light, she said.
I hadn’t known how handy
a ruined future would have been, how neatly
it would excuse us from the next day’s questions.

When she walked into the kitchen, I wasn't sure
if I was seeing a mushroom cloud exit the room
or whether it was hair against sundown. 

A ship took the window’s light
out of the cloth. She set the clock for seven-ish.
Wanting something to last is not the same
as wanting it unchanged. I lay there with the streets
still turning in me, all the stairs I hadn’t taken
coming down, the doors opening behind doors.
A city without a labyrinth sends the maze inside the locals. 

She put the lamp out. The silk kept all its colours
where we couldn’t see them.
I knew the window by the colder dark.
She moved my hand to where she wanted it.

Darkness does not remove the room we’re in.
It just removes us.