I stood to one side of a supermarket car park
and sat for a smoke on an abandoned rust-brown girder
enmeshed in vigorous wild-grown grasses, hardy shoots,
as the melancholy shoppers in red shorts/ saris/ sandals
wheeled to each vehicle a high-stacked silver cage.
The sun unEnglishly vital, I remember, the clean smell of tar
as I watched fat bumblebees excellently hovering/
pollen shopping/ in and out of the grey-haired perfect thistles,
and my mind unfocused, an orange butterfly fluttering
in thorn-to-cabbage-bloom unbroken movement, aptly random,
until drawn in by a single plant leaf, lustrous, waxy,
on a single irrelevant plant stem—as in the fizz of some
wondrous relaxing tonic I sensed my guilts dissolve
so that a puff of animated pollen held in suspension there
and the butterfly stopped still in the motionless air.
And visioning all about me as desolate-peaceful—
the suburbs rubbled, the twin towers of Tesco's now decrepit—
I sat in a greeny Eden raised like a hill above time,
and I thought I saw below me, down the hill, souls in torment
circling, monsters in the trashcans refining anguish,
survivors in the ashes suffering the same; mine too
was down there in the thick of it as the Spanish horseman
galloped by on his way to fantasies impregnable to mere reality—
but how could I hope to help or intervene, as only
in the ad hoc haven I'd invented, in the greenness of it,
could I stub out anguish as easily as the embers of a cigarette
to watch both ash and filtertip nourish in the soil
the tawny bushes as an ideal home for butterflies and bees?
(1999)
