Loping through thick snow, fur matted with ice, they have lost the trace that led them long ago from a legendary tale to this blank page of survival. Their warm breath freezes at the touch of air as they huddle here with sharp, bewildered faces grown solemnly pale and howl and howl and howl.
My uncle in his uniform, dog-collared, briar clutched at an angle, brilliantined hair with a central parting, très debonaire. This could have been central casting for the role of padre in a West End show, his Now let us pray moment, except that he’d left for war the next day. He returned to be vicar of several parishes, a warrior in mufti, modest, diligent, but no less the charmer of that portrait in his trim battle-dress, and seldom without the starched shine of a collar’s halo around his neck, put on each morning, still not a little glamorously worn.
It hangs, a mobile in the stairwell, always in motion however slight. Each silver scale as it sparkles there a neighbourly lodestar guiding us home to where we shall meet for ever in friendship beyond the darkness of your loss. Nothing you made that did not shine, nothing you dreamed can leave us now. And so we give thanks for this precious gift as it swims through the air to the sound of your laughter.
I shall be radioactive For eight hours afterwards And must be careful To avoid intimate contact. The prospect of this Alarms me, but what now Suddenly comes to mind Is just how alone I felt Standing in Hereford Cathedral October 1962 Beside the Mappa Mundi With Krushchev banging on As nuclear war seemed Unavoidable, that the world Could soon be dust, this sacred Storehouse of humanity And faith be flattened In an instant. Eight hours Or not much more Was all I’d have to hurry home Before our precious intimacy Would vanish in the void And love, left echoing, Become an empty word.
I can’t read fiction any more And that’s a fact. Don’t ask me why. God only knows, old fruit. If a poem doesn’t rhyme, forget it. I certainly have. Today’s lunch Was a damned good salmon en croute, And tomorrow more tests, more tests To hear my ticker count its beats Like Tennyson. So put in the boot With the old one two. Pour me a double Straight down the horse’s neck And sound mortality’s horn. Toot toot. As I sit here in the tweeds of bufferdom I try to forget myself. Who’s in, Who’s out? Why should I give a hoot? You won’t persuade me otherwise, Lord Cobber, I’m far too far gone for that. All I shall do is shrug, deny, refute But hope at least this feature you intend Will turn a penny for us both.
They dibble the turf with fork and trowel eagerly, eagerly going to it, each whiskery bulb unclutched and buried as we their assistants kneel beside them. Ours is the knowledge, the choice of season, the nurturing landfill, the bedding down, but theirs the trust in a world new-minted, like prospectors for the future’s gold.