UNDERFOOT                                                                       

“To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why

 May not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander

Till a find it stopping a bung-hole?”

So asked the Danish Prince of his friend, returning

Yorick’s, his father’s jester’s, earthy skull to its

ditch of twenty-three years and calling to mind the great

arrears of esteem, centuries swollen, owed to the mightiest Greek.

Thus, once each stitch was gone, a bone was a bone and a skull but

one thereof, and smelled of such while folding into

the Earth, ready for the work of senators and serfs.

 

I wonder if we are too tidy? The Prince played with a brace of

dusty heads before he cupped the jester’s in his hands

and called up fond remembrances, thence thoughts for

all of us bearing (aware or not) our mortality on our backs.

Do we just get swept and cleared away? The

living tread hurriedly across the dead’s lost domains,

so missing, perhaps, the lessons of their silence, their

random soft soliloquies, seeping from fixed smiles.

 

Who lies beneath my garden seat? On whose

neck do I rest my careless feet, seeking no

permit for the privilege, offering no

thanks for the landscape laboriously wrought

by a score of generations from what went before?

Each of us, and of them, was dropped by another

and each will bequeath his all to everyman –

no matter what tiers of wealthy wills and codicils

might declaim: more law for landlords, done in the

blood of those denied and dispossessed.

Be sure that, for all, there will be a levelling,

no later than the final, dry croak that

opens the gate to communes underfoot.

 

There lie no narcissi in that place,

none have race or gender, nation, creed,

features fine or foul, yet there reside the

remnants and residues of countless lives,

each with a duty to do the bidding of any

man who would dig his hand into wet soil or

toil all day perfectly furrowing a corner of this

spinning globe. Or, as the Dane mused, over time

come to fashion well a barrel stopper! For many,

improper indeed, beneath them, way back (when?);

now content to contribute to man’s daily labours.

 

My prayer is therefore a simple one:

lay me under the azaleas now in bloom –

a tomb ignored so long as

colour floods in early summer, where

I can work, unseen, unknown, till

colour fades for the last time; and I

move on, and on, and on.