| Holiday Home On the tail of a rare
day of Summer
We dropped like gannets from the stilling heat
Into the cool plunge of your home.
Glare-blind, we flopped in your uneasy chairs
That pocked the calculated starkness,
Too low in birth, and less in height,
To level-peg the stares
Of your ancestral oils.
Your rooms rolled on,
So artfully bestrewn with mags
(The Field, of course, my dear),
And blood-coordinated walls,
Peppered and bespattered with the prints
Of you and yours ascendant
On limp and oozing lumplets
Of discarded prey,
Hung and gutted to the satisfaction
Of their betters.
But in the last and furthest room,
Corelli swirls like Autumn leaves
Around the polished trunk
Of your magnificent piano;
While snug and cosy couches drift
In looping currents from the bank,
Past riversides
Of warm remembrances of friends.
Your husband made this room before he died,
And living still, encushioned here,
He smokes and chats and yarns,
Eyeing Highland sunsets
Through dram-tinted glass.
And only here do hands of calm,
Stilled from other work, and focussed in,
Unveil a monument to grief
Too desperate, too cutting and too deep
To tell to anyone
Except to us, the strangers.
Not Built in a Day
Slit your throat or slap you with the butt,
The wind blows both ways.
Slicing over tussocks in this Jupiter-forsaken land,
It strips your flesh and grinds your brain,
To the porridge texture
Of the pewter sky.
Nice one, Rome. Despatch me here,
The furthest outpost of the bleakest land,
Where Winter's up and running, and Summer's lying sick,
Where olives only smile inside a jar,
And Beer's the garlic-chewing poxhead friend
Who coughs all over you when Wine is occupied elsewhere.
Marcus, can you hear, below this sodden moss?
You stood last year where I am now, the very year
They gathered up their longhaired boastful pride,
Descended like the wolf, and slew.
Most like they ate your bones, my friend,
But certainly it fuelled their screeching harps
And strutting mouths
For months to come.
This bank I hate; this slope I loathe;
This moss-encrusted earth I curse.
I, Julius, Commander of the Second,
Do lay this doom:
That for the murder lately done,
There will be more.
That for the bragging of these clowns
There will be pain.
That all this valley and its sides
Become a Hell
Destroying all within its grip,
Until the endmost rattle
In the throat of Time.
I name this place Moss Side.
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