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Sport 34: Winter 2006

Martinborough, 31 December 1999

page 161

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.