Thresholds and labyrinths: lines on “travel” and “place”

Cambridge, sluiced out heritage. Full medieval service plan.
Passages for few thoughts other than of the old institution exist
In the minds of those who think of Cambridge.
No manual evacuations, no car parks. Only wait outside the weird walls.
Other ideas of it aren’t easily formed, so tightly is it sold.

Aberdeenshire, with distant local stones everywhere,
Suddenly, in fields, from nowhere, according to Julian Cope, who was surprised.
Tread balefully while that place leaks past economics,
stones, time, the air in between snowdrops.
Grappling sunlight and Baltic rain.

Lowestoft, land of the rising sun in jokes,
Wringer out of pleasure, fish, is near forgotten.
It’s quite populous, W G Sebald is wrong and dead, but Lowestoft’s still live.
Not far back, reed-skin boats tack rills, like Nile land.
Certain smells and laughter stay, for the time being.

With executive sufficiency,
Brighton filled again, it’d had a good few years going down.
If only its underclass would look up at Whitehawk Camp and cheer.
Scorched, the paving slabs, and elsewhere a girl hails me, wanting money.
And strange things happening in the land as we walk down from Woodingdean.

Chance control and localism in Lewes, bonfire night.
Conviviality, folklore, intensity policing inside out.
Magico-material divides: class, memory, property outcomes.
Saturated funerary recall of great-grandfathering that,
Never to be forgotten, just got itself half-remembered in Lewes.

All of a sudden, Dun Aeongas, all of a place.
A slate fort, grassy ring, nut, or pip, at the edge of Inis Mor,
The island’s not a stone library of old slippages.
Calling in the wind, two Spanish men reach for America with their toes outstretched.
Some form of words must have undone the absent population.

Neil Palmer, 2003

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