On a fog-cowled island
bobbing in the North Sea
like an iceberg—
little more than a chip
on Europe’s shoulder;
next to the butcher shop
and across from the dry-goods
in a one-horse, twenty-pub,
cod-ridden town smackdab
in the Midlands, and called
Eckington;
hemmed in by coal mines
and the Sitwell acreage
where he first saw holly
growing wild: unplaited
and prickly all summer’s
dead heat; in a row house
that sprawled up, not along
(flatiron warming
on the coals, chenille tablecloth
laid with empty jam jars
and mixed crockery, the gaslight
begging for another penny);
three flights high
in an attic room overlooking
the Roman church and well spots
(from there to eye’s limit,
khaki & green fields
sprouting wheat and cabbage);
in the blue bedroom,
under the eiderdown,
on a mattress fretted
with switchbacks and gullies;
out of a Saxon woman
on Market Street,
married there, and, lifelong,
moved only ten yards or so;
through her tipped gullet:
queer, but sounder than my own;
knee-deep in her spine;
from a womb they unlatched
and tilted down like a chute;
covered with umbilical sackcloth
from the start, Paul landed
in this world on his feet.