The Engine-House, Danescombe Mine

As if sleep were a ship
that had carried us to the edge
of the world’s wide rim
(over which we might slip),
we awoke. Night sucked
at the panes, its black mouth
pressed to the glass. You’d been dreaming
of cliffs and falling. Terror filled
your eyes as they locked onto mine –
limpets in their sockets, jellified.

Nerves strained tight as violin strings,
diaphragm pulled taut as a drum,
it was as if two hemispheres
had met: clamped one to the other
at the seams of the cerebellum.
The brain’s an astrolabe; wrought
more intricately than a compass,
it tells us how far we’ve come.
But if thoughts are stars
to be read, that night was dark.

Clueless in the moonless wood,
we listened as an owl’s screech
eviscerated the silence –
waited for the metallic clunk
we’d both heard to be repeated.
An intruder, or phantom engine
haunting this industrial hulk?
Like siamese twins, we shared the same
heart-beat, laughed the same laughter
when the boiler began its cycle.

Was that all it was then?
As dawn unknotted the tangle
of our gothic panic (showed us
thorn bush, stone wall, mine-shaft)
we discerned the outlines of each
single object, felt ourselves intact.
Yet it seemed that the copper wire
sourced from that Cornish vein had charged
our fibres – making us part
of Frankenstein’s experiment.