If you are about to die now
there is nothing I can write for you.
History is silent about this.
Even Napoleon, face huge as a plate,
disguised the advance guard and said:
‘Why they sent for my brother is because
he, and not I, is in trouble.’
The screens come down. The nurses disappear
like the tails of fishes. The clouds
are white as cotton wool and also
Dettol outlives the perfume.
The unshaven man in the next ward
is given shaving lotion for Christmas.
Sorrow stands like a stork on one leg,
brooding.
The coloured windows give way to plain.
The horsemen crossing the moor are comrades
going the other way into the country
of the undisciplined and the free.
Here there is the Land of the Straight Lines
with a banner black and silent,
a black mirror
with the image of an old rose.
History does not warn us of this.
Napoleon’s face expands to a window.
The manic thoughts fly outwards, beating.
‘The documents did not tell me.
There was no announcement in the salon.
Why is it that the chairs are getting crooked?
Why is it that my army does not bear me?
They are eating, laughing by the stream.
I shout to them, ‘Put on your armour.’
But they do not listen.
They do not know me, they are relapsing
into the marsh of their idleness.
They are schoolboys escaped from Latin.
O how afraid they are of Excellence.
They admire their faces in the water.
They splash in the new bubbles.’