Well before the place was up for sale I scooped
The innards out and tipped them right there on the skip,
Exposing various old privacies to public view:
The lidless laundry basket that hid so long in the corner,
The crippled joke of a chair with the inward hinging leg,
The rearing cardboard arse of the pre-everything TV
And the pattern of pipes on the back of the fat moaning fridge.
I couldn’t say I felt the pain of self-evisceration
But the shame of having housed such rot round the heart of me.
A pampered car in the crescent was yelling for no reason,
As if to remind me why I had to leave the town.
Panting because of being a little out of condition,
I watched my thrown-up mound, imagining I could see
A slight stirring or shift, some small initial evidence
Of the elements regrouping after their rude eviction
And plotting a reinstatement of the old order.
But it was just a shard of the Spanish holiday vase
Slumping down the side of the powder-dusted summit.
The moon came sliding out of a cloud like a coin from a purse
And sat on the roofs and shone as hard as an afternoon sun,
Throwing my shadow across the street and up the houses,
Staring its headlamp stare on the heap of barren matter.
Feeling myself uncouple from the long freight of memory –
The train sloughed to a standstill – I waited for my liberty,
A man at a meeting point at the due time of delivery,
The peace dividend yielded by the ended wars of possession,
The hostage spirit sprung, the final triumph of riddance.
By came the fox from his nearby place on the fringe of the heath,
Padding bold as you please, appended at the feet
To his private dark, huge as a flat black horse
Proceeding at its mimic pace across the tarmac.
Double yellow with the moon, his eyes gave back
The brightness of the night. There was a time
When he would have gone along all halting, hidden and diffident,
Shifty at the bins, a drunk caught at the optics,
Lumped in with the less-thans, travellers and shysters,
Acting out accordingly like any bad-name dog.
But that was back in the days before the emancipation,
Before the regular sorties from his half-country habitat
And the ease with which he cracked the code of success in town
And swaggered in broad day among his two-legged peers,
His brush held proud and bushy above the ground,
His line all fine, his common history junked.
He approached me as if to start some sort of conversation,
Rather in the manner of a confident man at a party
Who feels he can dispense with the business of introduction,
Or certain religious salesmen starting to explain
Whatever it is the lamb of God is said to do.
But then he eyed the detritus and stood back all superior,
Swiftly nosing out and analysing the rationale
Of this vertical clothed animal apparently clearing house
At the dead of night. I swear he saw the beginning of guilt
In my eye and, satisfied with that, he just said “Hi,”
And passed along the road that leads to the centre of town.
He said the word in such a way as to imply
That just as he knew what he meant, so too did I.