Coming back from a scan nothing serious a blocked gland that’s
Healing itself, still inflamed, ‘it takes a while’ the ultra sound artist
Says and so I set off back through the rain past the remains of a leat in the
B&Q car park, running down the side of the M&S Food Hall. Despite the
Days of rainfall its defunct channel is still dry, I track it under the road where it
Emerges between two black walls in waste ground and then reappears behind
A Palmerston fort that is not admitting the public today. I think about forming a political
Party to restore to full flood all the buried rivers and tainted leats of the city and connect it all back together, and I wonder if the black serpent in the estuary is just
One tendril or tentacle of this beast. Just before the footbridge I
Turn towards the Church of the Ascension, I’ve long desired to
Get inside its modernist interior, but a black wolf appears with a blood red
Ball in its mouth and I veer back to the road. Under the belly of the flyover I
Wonder whether its concrete mass on stilts is a manifestation of
The water monster? There are many signs under there – to Widey Court and the royalist
Failure in the civil war and back to the church – when it strikes me: resurrection wasn’t enough? It was
Necessary to levitate, wings on fire, an angel burning up like the stick of a struck lucifer.
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Phil Smith
Picture Nick Victor
Phil Smith is a writer, researcher, performance-maker, a member of Crab & Bee and Wrights & Sites, and company dramaturg for TNT Theatre (Munich).
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