I
In the Old Country
Before the Plague
There was that one day
Armand and I
Were let out early
In celebration
Of the President’s Aunt’s
Birthday
And we mooched throughout
The cobbled alleyways
In efforts to avoid
The Grand Parade
Til, from a doorway in the
Tinshack outhouse
Behind the Glass Cathedral
A Deacon
Barely older than ourselves
Hissed and beckoned
With a bag of gold.
The bag itself was bright chartreuse,
The gold in tiny, trinket coins
Dating from back before
A previous Generalissimo
Debauched the currency and hastened
His demise debasing all our coinage
With Magnesium.
Our task, the deacon whispered
Would be simple, also legal,
Though silence guaranteed
The bag of gold
And that was how we ended up
300 yards apart
At either end of the Glass Cathedral’s
Famous Crystal Nave,
The light screaming in like needles
Reflected from the buildings circling
The Piazza, their window panes and gilt
Cannoning back the autumn sunshine
Off the Radio Station, The Palace of Telephony,
The Ministry of Teeth and the spare, Modernist
Simplistic hulk of the newly built headquarters
Of the Security Police,
Winner of the previous season’s Architectural Prix d’Or
At a secret ceremony at a dishevelled coastal resort,
The award collected by a nameless man.
We stood, each wrapped in drying canvas,
On a little pile of books -
Bibles, books of diets, philanthropic reports,
With sacks over our heads,
Enjoined to scream blasphemous obscenities
To see if we could make
The Archimandrite’s niece
Up in the minstrel’s gallery,
Start giggling.
In this task we had good fortune.
Within seconds loud guffaws
Greeted our muffled imprecations
About God’s Mother’s cunt,
Though the niece, much older than we’d guessed,
Still blushed as we shook hands and she
Refastened her corset
And we ran off with the gold coins
Xylophoning in the pockets of our shorts
The chartreuse bag an ad hoc, useless kite
Trailing behind us like a simple younger
Cousin.
And we each of us now had enough
For three months of accordion lessons
And with what we had left over
We ate bowlful after bowlful of
Moles jugged in wild mulberries,
A famous speciality
Of the gypsy bistro tucked away behind
The Yiddish puppet theatre.
II
In the Old Country
Before the Plague
In the dusty gully
Through which the river roared
In Winter,
Carolling songs that made the old men weep
But which now trickled like their tears,
Armand and I
Were pelting an old yak
With scraps of rusty shrapnel
Washed here from last summer’s
Air raids in the Spring.
But then, from on the gantry
Across the Rose Water Weir,
The superintendent saw us, shouted
And Gave Chase,
His kepi flying off his head behind him
Like a dove.
In my leather clogs I had soon
Made my escape, but Armand
Was quickly collared, swiped
And carried away kicking
To spend a penitential afternoon
Scrubbing off the crowshit
From the pedestal of
The President’s favourite nephew’s
Tungsten statue.
Down at the shrunken river’s edge
The old women scrubbed the icons
In the purple water
Telling filthy jokes in high-pitched,
Pickled grunts, and cackling
Like bankers.
III
In the Old Country
Before the Plague
After we’d both been expelled
From the Cadet Academy
Armand ran away to join the partisans
In their vicious insurrection, rising up
To smash the action of the
Ministry of Chthonic Culture’s
Cruel private militia
And I took up a boring post
Counting speckled air
In the ventilators
Whining with a contemptuous disdain
Above ceaseless production lines
In the burlap mills.
After finishing a late shift
I stood waiting for the last tram back
Into town
Staring with feet-rocking ennui
Down the unlit street which
Broke into gloomy flashes distending to the night.
Then I saw an old, one-legged man,
Leaning on a broken lampstand as a crutch,
Stomping along beside the ditch
Towards the stop.
Once we stood nose to nose
I didn’t even feign eye-contact,
Looking out around his peaked hat
For my tram.
Still, he wheezed into his thick white moustache
Ochred at its tips by cheap cheroots
With barking tales of when, back then
When he was still a Third Class General,
He led a stirring yet disastrous action,
The famous Last Charge of the Second Llama Corps,
In some old war
Against those dog-headed men
Who lived across the mountain,
Apparently Our Ancient Foes.
I glanced and smiled,
Relieved to hear
The tram perform
A buzzsaw scream
Cornering an unseen bend.
He tapped his mottled nose and coughed
Onto the dusty road
Offered me a pull from
The unlabelled bottle in his
Thin, three-fingered hand,
Its contents, limpid, puce, four-fifths gone and
Greasily glowing
As I drank.
Here’s how! He croaked,
And vowed next year he was set on
Growing his own head
Back down beneath his shoulders,
Back to the good old days.
I saw that the approaching tram
Was full.
IV
In the Old Country
Once the desert filled
Suburban streets
And they razed the university
To make room
For the plague pits
We were ushered onto the buses
And driven to the airfields.
Armand was now in exile,
Conspiring in foreign food queues,
After the Acetone Atrocity
At the Botanical Gardens
Three years before
While my wife and children had been among
The very first succumbing to the Plague.
Camphorated tapestries hung in the
Stinking breeze
Beside the huts,
Hassled humanitarians
Gently obliging us
To climb
The frail, flapping rope ladders to the ships,
Assuring us our bags,
Just meagre sacks with scraps of sacramental
Memories
Would follow on.
A bearded engineer opined
With unconvincing logic about
New opportunities that would open to us
In our refuge homes
As mad old crones,
Crook-backed, crooned as they
Cockroached up aboard,
Insisting
We were being sent off
Way way beyond the Moon’s right arm.
Soon, looking down, I watched
As the steppe started to dissolve.
