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LA BASSEE, OCTOBER 1914
Loyalties are slightly squint
when singulars turn into twos;
it was the plural of us that I never met.
The photographs of cousin Hugh
were always this or that, an exiled child,
he may have been a martinet;
I can’t imagine him having sex,
his stiffness eschewing passion only etiquette.
What is it about him that repels me and attracts?
The uniforms and letters to Aunty Lil?
Obsequious thankyous and kindly drivel
that hid the deeper feelings of his will.
It is now impossible to tell the tragic
alignment that may have been a private hell.
He read classics at Magdalene Oxford;
a surreal preparation, attenuated and ethereal.
To gather him is fractured, he seems in bits.
Devoted to his college, temperate and popular
he came of age after the century changed,
emerged gleaming, like a polished Hussar
immediately commissioned as an officer
into a ghostly army of Boer War vignettes
he neither understood nor foresaw his death;
brightening his leather holster and epaulettes.
An hypnotic un-reversibility of events,
between two families death-pathetic mood,
had the first world war break out;
quite frankly, fucking rude.
Tall field officers in khaki service caps
strolled the Flemish woods, machine-gunned,
briefly discourteous of each others death,
flinching like lovers from bad breath.
His widow, who I met once in 1967, rather frail,
(staring back toward the telegram boy
I may have resembled at the door that October)
thought I might be someone to employ;
unable to comprehend passages of change
my long hair and jeans, a rub of cannabis
she thought a very refined cologne
and said so amongst the Persian carpets,
bone china and silver on blackened dressers,
while we listened to the growl of light aircraft
dispatched like threats from the neighbouring aerodrome.
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