2001

Riding the F Train that August –

from Queens to Manhattan, Jamaica

Estates to Times Square – were all

of the hues and tongues and tribes and faiths.

Dead at our door, on our return,

wings stretched as if in flight,

lay a hen harrier, a female.

You chose to bury it gently

in the warm September earth.

Five thousand miles away, we watched

the towers fall. Later, building Babel

replaced the grace of humanity.

So many of the peoples of the earth

had gathered there. In the plaza’s fountain,

a bronze globe had turned perpetually. All

went to dust in a whirligig of fire.

2003

Atlantic waves broke on the empty sand.

Undeterred by us, a beetle crossed the dunes.

Almost due south was Casablanca.

…in all the towns in all the world…

We followed the war by satellite. Graven

effigies fell. Truths unfurled like smoke, like spume.

In the estuary – where ships from Tyre

and Ostia Antica had hoved to –

at low tide, small crabs emerged, waving.

…in all the gin joints in all the towns…

Wretches, saved, like you and me!

as Manhattan’s,  Chicago’s – its totems

of wealth, faith and dominion – belies

the city’s cruelty: fortunes from famine,

despotism, slavery; licensing

of squalor, bigotry and despair.

In the park where the Orange Lodge drummed out

The Twelfth, a rape was immediate headlines -

white girl, black youths. In Toxteth – its decayed

squares and terraces built on molasses

and cotton, some street signs repainted green,

gold, red, the colours of Rastafari -

was daubed, ‘Vote ANC’.

Chirk Castle from the North, Peter Tillemans, 1725

As we walk up the steep driveway, stopping

for breath at the curve where the castle

comes into sight – raised to block the routes

through the Dee Valley and Glyn Ceiriog

to starve the Welsh – a beribboned Rolls

descends, bride waving, followed, on foot,

by the wedding party in straggles -

black suits and brown shoes, wispy wedding hats -

treading the incline with tipsy effort.

‘The radio and the telephone

And the movies that we know

May just be passing fancies,

And in time may go!’

George Gershwin, born Jacob Gershovitz,

the second son of Russian immigrants,

ex song plugger in Tin Pan Alley

at Remick’s on West 28^th Street,

in his thirtieth year visits Europe,

renews acquaintance with Alban Berg,

Ravel, Poulenc,  Milhaud, Prokokiev

and William Walton, hears Rhapsody in Blue

and Concerto in F performed in Paris.

From the grassed walk above the Ha-ha,

we can see the main gates, unused now,

the lane to the station, the Cadbury

and MDF factories, the market town

of Chirk itself and, beyond, the panorama -

from Bickerton Hills to The Long Mynd -

as we follow the trail of illicit confetti

to the Doric Temple aka summerhouse.

‘But, oh my dear,

Our love is here to stay.

Together we’re

Going a long, long way.’

The 8^th Lord Howard De Walden – Tommy

to friends and family, Eton and Sandhurst,

Boer War and Great War, race horse owner,

playwright, theatre impresario -

turned its 14^th century chapel

into a concert hall and invited George.

The westering sun shines upon us, dreaming

in the Temple, your head upon my shoulder.

A flock of starlings swarms suddenly

above the town – waltzing, deceiving like

a net, substantial, delicate – and is gone.

‘In time the Rockies may crumble,

Gibraltar may tumble,

There’re only made of clay,

But our love is here to stay.’

There is no public record of what he played

or when or how he got here. I like to think

he chose the stopping train from Paddington,

to work on An American in Paris,

and that Tommy met him personally

at Chirk Station, drove him up the hill,

in his Hispano-Suiza, through the baroque

wrought iron gates replete with wolves’ and eagles’ heads -

and as they, genius and renaissance man,

chatted about the history of the place,

along the chestnut lined drive among

the grazing sheep, George thought of Brooklyn’s

geometric streets and of Manhattan’s roar.

Remick's Music Store, 1914