Almost anywhere there’s a poem lying around
Waiting for someone to lift it up, dust it off,

For instance, the argument with a neighbour
About a large dog: was it a German Shepherd

Or a mutt? Would it jump into the sea hereabouts
To save a child, if a child went overboard?

The argument was conducted in civilized terms,
But we stood in the street, there were distractions,

In spite of which we both felt for the crux:
Does a dog have a will capable of the Good?

Insistent as I was that, however eagerly it swam
Toward the child, a mutt, being untrained,

Might forget the good it had set out to do,
I was brooding on something else – the dignity

Of the dog, whatever it was, standing as we had seen it
There on the prow of a small rubber boat;

That figurehead of a dog, did it know
How dignified it might look to the likes of us?

Who cared if it jumped into the water?
Who cared if it collared a floundering child?

And under the brooding lurked, not yet material,
A poem scheming to coax into focus a local image –

Ten dinghies fluttering tiny peppermint sails,
Each dinghy a nest with two children in it,

Strung out on a cord behind the rubber mother boat,
All the children laughing, waving, and feeling free,

The bursts of song from the children’s throats,
And before them, gold against an oceanic blue,

The figurehead dog, ears pinned back by the wind,
His attention to it all, and a great joy in his jowls.

Even then, the scene: and the poem would pivot
On breathlessness, a moment of suspense.

How, it would say, as the procession of dinghies
Headed away from the coast and out to sea,

Either their voices had passed out of earshot,
Or else the children were learning fear.

The silence now as they skim over the water.
The blue of a ravening deep underneath them.

I had the coloured tombs in mind,
The elegant parlours, barrel vaulted;
You did not have to dig so deep;
By mid-morning the spade had opened
A sunlit vault where the dead lay, smiling

Not even a king and his consort. A Captain
At most, then a Baker by the name
Of Smart-Ass; it was written
Bold in sepia on the wall of the vault.
Nameless lovers, they captured interest,

Because the artist had painted a musical
Instrument only. For animals a dish
Of water and a rib with meat on it
Were sufficient; children had their names
And dolls, quaint, with amiable features.

*

Now it is difficult. The graves go down
Deeper. The dead are tangled in a heap,
Scooped up and in and left to rot.
Waves of them come up with a stink,
Agony in the gaping rhomboid mouths,

Some with bedroom slippers on their feet.
So many, how to identify them? How
Insert into such a moist dissolution
The fizz of feeling what they felt?
How hard the spade treats their pit,

For the antique mass graves were no prettier;
Below bright multitudes there was only earth.
Herded by radio signals, decrepit codes,
And closing now the hoop, above the business,
Killers converge, dull as the dirt itself.

*

I dig and dig; still no rockbottom. Up
Through layers goes the life: the damned (select,
Graded along the lines of a belief system);
The purged; then the beautiful, sublime – ?
A breath rotates the stars? Up my street

The ordinary, the losers, and police patrols
Pull back, then squinny as through chinks
In a forest: there still might be a glade,
Filthy with condoms and broken bottles,
Where someone hangs out, punctured, with a cry

Claiming he’s been abandoned. Who,
Who but a fool would lend him a hand?
He’s a statistic, we have jiggered our symbols,
And blink unawed at the galaxy. The one wand
Deploys vacantly its many magic darts.

*

Love one another, they said, as if a say-so
On Dover Beach, or in Manhattan, shamed the cruel,
As if it purged away the myth or purging.

Words that taunt waken only the bad blood.

I should return with my spade to simple tombs.

Spectres, vast, remote,
Uneasily wagging their heads
In shrouds of crushed amethyst:

Tomorrow I will confirm
That they are hill crests.
And slopes parade the green oak, olive,

Serried cherry.
On sunken pots of Rome
An iridescence, thick
Or light, signifies the human:

Should the moment return
At sundown’s onset
I will ask what is this colour,

Again a few score of breaths,
And scaling the underside
Of pine branches

An aqueous rose, diffused.
Neither quality, nor adjunct.
How long so old.