while time clears
Our lenses, lifts a focus, resurrects
A periscope to glimpse what joys or pain
Our eyes can share or answer – then deflects
Us, shunting to a labyrinth submersed
Where each sees only his dim past reversed…
                                           Cape Hatteras, Hart Crane

Stella turns left out of the college and heads for a bridge spanning the canal. It’s a historic cast iron structure, which divides the commercial city centre from an area of run down residential housing.  As Stella steps onto the bridge she remembers some lines from a poem about Brooklyn Bridge.  The poem is long and difficult and Stella’s not sure she understands it all, but she walks to the slow rhythm of its words.  They seem appropriate to this moment, when crossing a bridge takes her back in time as well as place.

Is it duty, familiarity, or a testing of her present against her past that takes Stella on this journey each week?  Unable to answer these questions, she stops for a moment and looks down at the dark water gliding under the bridge. As she watches its slow passage, her thoughts too, travel back to a quiet dark room where a woman sits alone smoking. Stella leans on the bridge’s rail, flicking at its chipped paint. Her face and the woman’s are both illuminated – one by the low evening sun, the other by the light of a puttering gas fire. Their hands too move nervously, scratching paint off metal and etching varnish from the chair arm.  

Stella shakes her ...