JOHN THE PRESENT

We have these patriarchs whose names are John,
With portraits on the almost falling walls
Of Highcliffe Hall. The oldest one, up there,
With the ginger beard, is known as John the Good.
Those are his woods, beyond the ha-ha fence.
He had the sense to hang around in town
With Capability Brown in his Brompton days
And managed to come away with the best ideas
Of the day, and over there, I guess, is where
The grim, prinked squares of Tudor topiary sat.
The other side of that– good God I’m pissed –
Is anyone listening to this? Oh very well,
Well then I’ll tell you all about the night,
Admittedly I was tight, as you’d be too
With a quart of Grouse in you, when, as I stared
At John the Good, I swear I saw his face
Fade and become partially replaced by another,
Not quite father or brother but something of both,
And then another beneath, and one below that
With a stovepipe hat, slightly battered and creased,
Till under them all a sort of beast appeared,
With snaggled ears and warts like insects, eyes
Reduced to the size of raisins by their leer,
And wolfish mouth with some queer knowledge of me.
And just as I could see him, so he saw
Me too as if through a door in time, quite faint
Like hastily overpainted patterns or just
A reflection-ghosted photo through a window,
But then slowly clear, emerging from mud
And peering plainly in blood-familiar ways.
My elder sister says, but John you’re barking,
As if such a remark were somehow new.
I’m sure that’s true, I reply, but just the same
I get the people’s names who x-rayed through
Elizabeth Vernon, maid to old Queen Bess,
In her slashed black dress and coif of lace
To find the face and bust of her old man,
Shakespeare’s patron, William Wriothesley,
Known more commonly as the Earl of Southampton.
May as well get the best ones. Have them here
With their imaging gear and pigment-tracing toys.
They’re brilliant boys, and to my great delight
Prove me right; those buried images
Were not the onset of DTs in me
But strata of paternity, the first
Being John the Bad, below him John the Worse.
Then last, but reverse of least, comes John the Shit.
And there they sit on this – I’ll do my best
To say it – palimpsest. The funny bit,
You must agree, is that it should be me
Who has the eyes to see, divining them.
Why me? Ahem, it must be in the genes,
This finding in family scenes transparency.
Whatever it may be  - don’t say the tipple’s
Making me see triple - up they come
All semi-unexpunged. Around they glance
With eyes that call “See what a merry caper
This new world, my masters, dances to,
That common strangers whom we kept at bay
By our enclosing, pay for rights of trespass,
Gawping at our likenesses. For shame.”
They bawl my name, like party-busting parents
Suddenly home, and then reel off the inventory,
Staring square at me. I find myself
Not quite on history’s shelf but at its heel,
The whole thing being a wheel with, at its crown,
Good John himself, all butter-wouldn’t-melt
And grand earl-belted; after him the slowly
Downward tilting bow: John the Leveller,
John the swivel-eyed embezzler, late
Of Newgate, then the general grab-and-greed
Of biped staggerweed sprung from suspect stuff,
The coils of rough with multi-barrelling names
And sadly plausible claims to chunks of land,
And so on to the final steep decline
To me and mine and this, our spavined wing
Like something on a mighty dying owl,
Our shifting quicksand vowels, so sunk from the classic
And our worse than brassic bank accounts
Whose minus amounts are even further fined
And raided blind nightly through the great hall floor,
Poor old porous thing that it now is,
As we re-miserate and bemoan, good grief,
Our being a little light on the leaf. The ground
Is made round by rotation. I say this
Not shimply cosh I’m shlightly shloshed
And downhill posh, but noticing the ways
That staying in one place for centuries
Never carries guarantees of stasis.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s sweet spring turns to autumn,
Shape sharpens to sheep. From the Forest of Arden
Down comes, begging his pardon, the bloody Bard,
And bloody hard it is to follow that.
In fact it all goes pretty jolly flat.
We have these patriarchs whose names are John,
Te-tum te-tum te-tum, so glad you’ve come.