THE INTERVAL
You can't go faster than the music
but you can have 'REPLAY'
written in gold across your chest.
I write this as a new way of building walls
around the palaces in their dust.
Because I've seen that it's just
a short march
to the reed-curtained marshes
and the girls wearing chequered headscarves.
Take their glances
and escape
down avenues lined with tin pans
where a white egret more than music
can help you to survive
the next hundred years.
But also, follow them to the interval,
their long brown backs thrown over their shoulders
their eyes hard shiny black
as watermelon seeds.
In the interval, every mother will be watching
her daughter's impression
of a rabbit falling down
or a tortoise coursing through the sand
or a frog edging through the reeds.
Then, like a boy with no laces in his boots,
one of them will wait for you
by the river, beyond the walnut tree
and she will tell you
she has invented a new pig
from the shadow of a trout
and you will be free to laugh
if you so wish.
Be not an old man with white hair
in your cellar
selling carpets made from history.
If it was ever thus, she would disappear
leaving the seller of carpets made from history
to be the someone in the cellar.
She comes here to wait by the river
where the urns have cracked
and to be the boy with no laces in his boots
flushing a frog from the pattern
of the carpet, making a tortoise with his hand,
falling down before you in an impression
of her own mother
louder than a white egret now
louder than the music
her hair bleached cold as a fridge
her breasts entombed with dust.
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