Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

Through the frost-hole of the passenger window
your tenant’s house is ringed in winter.
He’s turning the snow from the path

that lay in the night. He can far less
handle a spade than you, dipping the lug
as though the shovel itself was unbalanced.

And what you found inside you would not forget:
room on room of bottled milk, gagging
the stairwell, the hallway, bookshelves,

like a stumbled-on ice world, a sweep of winter.
For years he maintained the world his parents left,
taking in milk he never drank. Evenings spent out

in the yard, piecing apart the Ford his father drove –
sill-lines, cogwheels, dippers fanned round him,
working each burr to a touch.

For years I coloured your world in hues
you didn’t recognise; never your island,
always your skerry – ‘unable to see

the romance of the thing for the thing itself’.
That, airing his house, the rancour
would catch as far as the common;

and what you found in the garage was scrap:
not the showpiece I’d imagined but the pin
pulled out, a car returned to the sum of its parts.

Driving now through the cloughs at dusk
I am struck by the things I can’t let go;
that some things weal on the body like braille –

the sight of you just home from the milk-house
matted and choking, your raw nose streaming,
gutting the fridge in two clean strokes –
like a swimmer striking out for land.