Ian Duhig

A Summer's Fancy

for Peter Didsbury

One day, soon after I died, I returned to Hull,

for my sins, on a literary pilgrimage, in honour

of a poet who publishes his books back to front,

if not upside-down and inside-out. But passing

Menwith's Pox Americana, my GPS went AWOL,

then I found myself genuflecting at the obelisk

to the Wold Newton Stone, found by the son

of Didius who quickened Sterne into literature.

For a meteor is a poem, a linguistic firework

declining between meteroid and meteorite,

dreamt on as Cybele, Grail, Ark of Plague,

panspermic rain. This anti-philospher's stone

shattered the glass houses which Aristotle built

on Eudox's foundations, then Ptolemy glazed;

a solar system of frozen ripples, descrete crystal

Chinese onionskins, sterile Russian doll-wombs

contraceiving intercourse between planets. Those

who live in glass houses shouldn't write poems,

as the Russian said to the American poet.

When I finally penetrated the ring road to Hull,

a rosary of sausages, hungry for more miracles,

at a butcher's shop I prayed while its proprietor

bickered with some customers about the Filioque,

the consubstantiality of the Logos and His Father.

Distracted by their argument, I took a butcher's

(that's as in "butcher's hook", Lady Etymology)

towards the shop window, I suddenly perceived

that I'd fathered a reflection poxy with raindrops,

which careered down the glass and special offers

like Hippodrome chariots. Although a pluviophile

of the complex lodge, equipped with handshakes

if not the Butcher's Apron, I am nevertheless also

the Emperor Justinian in the worst year of my reign,

alone in my imperial box, occluded by rising dust

from horses' hooves, enduring Blues' and Greens'

Mexican waves, their theological abuse in verse

which stresses the penultimate or antepenultimate

syllables in each line. The Empire is a plague to me,

a flea-circus, and I miss my Empress Theodora,

who knew about circuses. There squats Procopius,

thinking I don't know about his libellous Anekdota.

Dirty wanker. He makes me feel the need to scratch,

to frisk myself for buboes, or at least for fleabites.

Fleas are rat-charioteers, or, if plague is a new

language, its poets and rats are their poems...

Now I am losing control of the metaphor as well.

At least rats can laugh. Their little feet skitter

across the Byzantine mosaic of this Greek poem,

millions in the record harvests of the centrury

flooding my narthex as the San Marco Basilica

will flood one day under our plundered horses,

or a Yorkshire street in what they call summer

with meteors of raindrops; unbegotten, uncreated

rain, both pre-existing and superior to the sun.

2009