Patrick Waites
Arriving
It is as if I came into town yesterday,
a beat-up bag across my shoulders
white with dust from falling
from the back of a scooter on the by-pass
heading for Brighton and a lost summer.
Up and down and in and out the ancient streets
I looked for cobbled lanes a car's width
where we sat in overheated jams
from taking clever short cuts bound for Cornwall.
Cathedral bells chimed to the hiss of radiator caps.
In vain I tramped the vennels, sink & soke
and finally on inspiration climbed the hill.
I saw the cathdral tower like a pill box
set in a spell of apothecaries’ windows;
something so monstrously ancient it lacked all grace.
I’m still a stranger here and keep that hue,
sauntering with tourist gait past the Royal Hotel
where a dark face in a fez would not be out of place.
Imagined palms flutter across from Queen Anne houses
where kept women of the Royal Household pressed their stays.
It lacks all carnival, a street fair shrieks embarrassment,
a county town forever off the beaten track. It closes
down at midnight of its own accord. Only the ghosts
of longdead wildmen roister here. A few returning
drunks watch them lunge past, tremble with fear.
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