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These are the wide, incredulous eyes of Harpo Marx, handed a plate which will soon be filled with the tangled cordage of fresh spaghetti.
They speak of astonishment at such reversals when the out-of-luck come into their own and the least they can do is eat up.
The post-prandial concert is inevitable. They are singing after supper their only song: We have only our talent and our hunger to give you;
We are the century's displaced, the scuttling survivors who seem to travel light but whose baggage is weightier than any braced trunk deep in the hold.
The tall girl
from Kildare, I imagine you
among horses and wide fields, having taken
the fence you faltered at, marrying your
man with the stubbled chin and the slow,
gentle smile. On our bar
stools, just the two of us, like an emblem
of innocence and experience, we rehearsed
your story: dismantled dreams when his car
left the country road and your heart,
untenanted, searching, came to ask
itself if happiness was the four walls of a good man's
house who would not survive you. On a lift into
town, he stopped at a barley field, waded out like
a fisherman in shallow seas, to stare at the
blank horizon as if a message were posted for
his attention, and came back
to the Land Rover, saying nothing. Our game of
tennis at dusk, the lost ball we foraged for in the long
grass where our hands brushed lightly and you turned
away, saying nothing. Do you rule now
a flagged kitchen in a big house
among fields, or do you trim
the plant of a single life with expert
fingers, sheathed in a green glove?
How Daphne might have felt as she ran from the breathy Apollo (before her skin was bark, her feet roots, her arms boughs in wild semaphore, her fingernails the bitter leaf destined for a victor’s crown) I felt in that nightmare of pursuit one is always destined to wake from.
The Russians, it may be, are crushing dissent. In Kuala Lumpur they are gaining merdeka. But in this kitchen my mother is shaking flour from a grey dispenser to her pastry board and in the garden there are rows of currant, gooseberry, and the knobbly branches of an apple tree, whose fat, peeled fruit cools in a pan while the pastry is rolled. Suburban England hears only the bee as it enters the kitchen to fly through the house with the soft drone of a biplane in a blue sky.
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