Brighton Rocks

My Favourite Things.

A sun-hit train chutes south towards Brighton, all techno hum and Sussex sway; you and your brother fit nearly to burst. We stole these flint bits from the beach after lunch, smooth and sharp as knuckle-bones. Later you bought me a scrap of leather worn soft as good liquorice and folded into keychain, a silver rivet inset like a toy’s mirror, a filled tooth. The early picture is you gone all Russian spy and indomitable resolve. These are the stones I worked with, worried over, pressing through today’s fresh snowfall, famished chickadees following me from the wood’s olive cover onto more open trails, mad-risking any hawk’s attention. Their alarmed hearts feathered the air, and along such faint frequency I recovered the way you laughed aboard that train, the fields soon enough giving way to chalk cliff giving way to sea.