Sport 34: Winter 2006
Martinborough, 31 December 1999
Martinborough, 31 December 1999
As soon as the new century has tidied up
after the old
this distant
departing music
will finally be gone
then we will amble far
from the lopsided horizon
our half-asleep bodies.
Then the rain that
need not bother us
need not
no longer. And the dogs that dig
their trenches
in the rose-garden of 1917
and the war dead
need never
have dug nor died—
the century best understood
as a sunlit chessboard
from which the last remaining pieces
have fled
our bodies far from us
and the grass beneath us
further still.