Avalon

To the Metropolitan Police Force, London: the asylum gates are locked and chained, but undone by wandering thoughts and the close study of maps. So from San Francisco, patron city of tramps, I scribble this note, having overshot Gloucester by several million strides, having walked on water. City of sad foghorns and clapboard ziggurats, of snakes-and-ladders streets and cadged cigarettes, city of pelicans, fish bones and flaking paint, of underfoot cable-car wires strained to breaking point    ... I eat little — a beard of grass, a pinch of oats — let the salt-tide scour and purge me inside and out, but my mind still phosphoresces with lightning strikes and I straddle each earthquake, one foot either side of the fault line, rocking the world’s seesaw. At dusk, the Golden Gate Bridge is heaven’s seashore: I watch boats heading home with the day’s catch or ferrying souls to glittering Alcatraz, or I face west and let the Pacific slip in bloodshot glory over the planet’s lip, sense the waterfall at the end of the journey. I am, ever your countryman, Ivor Gurney.