Heron at Port Talbot Snow falls on the cooling towers delicately settling on cranes. Machinery's old bones whiten; death settles with its rusts, its erosions. Warning of winds off the sea 5 the motorway dips to the dock's edge. My hands tighten on the wheel against the white steel of the wind. Then we almost touch, both braking flight, bank on the air and feel that shocking 10 intimacy of near-collision, animal tracks that cross in snow. I see his living eye, his change of mind, feel pressure as we bank, the force of his beauty. We might have died 15 in some terrible conjunction. The steel town's sulphurs billow like dirty washing. The sky stains with steely inks and fires, chemical rustings, salt-grains, sand under snow. 20 And the bird comes, a surveyor calculating space between old workings and the mountain hinterland, archangel come to re-open the heron-roads, meets me at an inter-section 25 where wind comes flashing off water interrupting the warp of the snow and the broken rhythms of blood.