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CLOSING SCENES of the Salisbury Festival:
Haydn and Mozart in St. Edmund’s Church,
A building soon to be deconsecrated
Because irrelevant to civic needs
And turned into a meaningful hotel.
Involuntarily the mind throws up
Fancies of Japanese, back from Stonehenge,
Quaffing keg bitter by the pulpit stair,
Swedes booking coach-tours in the chancel.
SALISBURY becomes a part of Area 5
In 1974, and so its mayor,
Whose office dates back to 1611
(The year of the King James Bible, actually),
Will soon be as irrelevant as the church,
But need not be turned into anything.
LATER THAT NIGHT, outside the City Hall,
Past the Cadena, Debenham’s, Joyland,
Men of the 1st Bn. the Royal Scots
Perform the historic ceremony of Tattoo.
Plaids, bonnets, flash of tenor-drummers’ sticks,
The pipes, stir the blood unmeaningfully
Till ‘Jesus Christ, Superstar’ rings out
In the quick march, and relevance is restored.
From Poetry Nation No 2 (1974)
Камень. Камены.
A swan engages in self-reflection.
The gardens of Leto do not commemorate Niobe.
Riven, the vernal ice drifts on the Never River.
Eva my daughter has a fever. Her face looks thinner.
She ate bread and butter my daughter.
She wants me to lie next to her, so that she may grab onto the sides of my head
and drift off to sleep.
Vater. Water.
She wakes up, goes to peepee. I hold her over the bowl.
I try to wrap her in a bathrobe. No, I’m schwitzing. I do not need it.
I’m not cold, I’m wet.
She sneezes, a Popel hanging out of her nose. Der Popel, but die Pappel.
Ich sah meine Pappel, and so on.
She “reads” Asterix and is delighted when I tell her that Ave is Eva
spelled backwards.
Papa, says Eva holding a brownish apple, schmeiss this weg. I schmeiss it weg.
We live in Berlin.
Rome has fallen, ye see it lying
Heaped in undistinguished ruin:
Nature is alone undying.
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