Supposing I should meet you soon—
Between the barmaid with the belly and the lash upon her cheek
And her husband with the hawser and the broom,
Caulking tar upon the timbers, wrecking pangs of ancient schooners
While Calypso sings the silence of her loom—
Should we meet between the claywright spinning pitchers half-enamel
And the seraph pinning feathers to her bones,
And the shingle shale a-cracking on the kisses of our parting
As the smokestacks past the tideswell beckon home—
Shall we meet between the starlight, thronging vines on Phigalia
And the tsipouro-drenched dryad, and her fig-flesh supple kissed,
In the mantic dreams of midnight, glutted black in belladonna,
Seeping venom through dawn’s evanescent mist—
Shall we meet between the winter, grazed on hellebore and ether
As the holly hollers Caiaphas in wounds;
And the bison drenching dung upon the dewlap and the udders
And the pasture churned a Passchendaele on hooves—
Should we meet between the coalman, blackened Santa with his rubble
O’erfreighted with earth’s anthracitic bowels;
And the scholar scarred in acne and the Attic Greek declensions
And the rottweiler flecked terror on his jowls—
Should we meet between the railtracks, draped in apple-seeded autumn
And the foliated wreaths on dappled rust,
As the dragonflies flash oilslicks on the oxidising waters
And whistling wraiths of clanking coal-train dust—
Should we meet between the midwife, champagne sibylline in visions
Popping prophecies of partum on the Holy Prepuce Eve;
And her quarryman, brows furroughed like the bedding for mam’s taters,
Ringing starlight into nicotine-bound sheaves?
Should we meet between the foundling cast to chitterlings and pity
And fostered in the sawdust, seeped in marrowbone and chine;
Apprenticed to the fingers, callused bevel-gauge precision
And the dovetails pencil-marked upon the pine;
And the epileptic cudgels falling silent on St Stephen’s,
At daybreak’s rosé canticles of wine
Decanted into crystalline, frost-feathered on his fingers
And the village silver wassailing his time—
Should we meet between these fragments, and the terracotta potsherds
As the palimpsestic darnel throngs the babble of wrought brick;
And the threshing-songs of Ceres through the parish at Ascension
And the psalms and thrashing branches bound the ancient bailiwick?
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