The Regiment
That morning they’d bent to don their black-soled boots
after hours through which none of them had slept.
Bending to tie them, not one thought to refuse
the fate that dogged them even as they crept
into the trenches; cheerful swipes and looks
to mask the snapping, banging dread
of their mortality written, poised to hook;
thinking of nothing but the sweating dread.
Their death pose, now preserved in picture form,
shows ten brown, soiled skeletons dug out from the pit
where the part-time sacristan had laid them down
hands clasped, the line of them unsplit
by years, by decades that have gone:
a regiment of bone-men, boots still on.
Merrick
From freak show to
freak show
they peddled him, his wares
a vast skull and bulbous, hanging
limbs, and people came to watch him
live
behind glass where his patron
put him charging shilling fares:
A shilling for a glimpse; a shilling’s charge
to see an elephant man shouldered
in a purple veil.
Who’s curiosity could fail?
said the painted banner at the top
of the seaside high-street booth
that’s now a sari shop.
Paquirri
From Zahara de los Atunes (Cádiz)
to Pozoblanco
to die
on the road to Córdoba
Paquirri
shadowed by his father and his father’s father,
set in his turn to shadow his sons
from Zahara de los Atunes (Cádiz)
to Pozoblanco
to die
on the road to Córdoba
Gore and the
flash of the traje de luces,
pink capes and lances and
banderilleros that leapt as they hooked.
The picadors’ flat hats like beekeepers
holding the stings of their bees and pressing
jabbing
pressing
into Avispado.
Avispado
Big and as black as the black on a bee
on the orange sand and the sun
bristled with porcupine red banderillas,
thrashing and lowing,
tossing, throwing
his head and his horn
to send Paquirri
Paquirri
down through the decades –
Zahara de los Atunes (Cádiz)
to Pozoblanco
to die
on the road to Córdoba
Victor
You’d think a savage child like him –
brought from the woods to change and tame –
would be loud and canine, wild and frantic-eyed,
malevolent and grunting.
He was not.
Wild Boy Rescued! the papers cried
The Child That Time Forgot!
and then the pictures showing how
they’d pulled him like a dawn-raid
out between the trees, and laid him
squat inside the Black Maria.
This one was docile, quiet. Gentle
when they’d washed him, threaded
the bracken from his yellow hair;
washed him then dressed him
like a pet, freak act under
gaudy letters; clothing him, buttoning
tight to the neck – he who’d gone
unclothed.
And at his throat the nurses
found a jagged smile of a scar. They
eyed each other, three of them, and tried
to cover what they thought it was: a foiled
infanticide.
They pitied him.
The doctors tucked
a fork into his hand, expecting him to eat
with it; attacking him with pointless whys
when he did not. He cackled guilelessly
and fixed them with his grey eyes.
And then they tried to teach him how to talk
and struggled sense out of his sounds
to fit their own. Just once, he seemed
to utter milk – like the caged mynah bird in the
matron’s room who quoted what it
heard the nurses say,
but wanting none of it
he skirmished underneath their fawning
palms, and broke
away.
One of the nurses took him as her son
and named him Victor with a lash of irony
thinking she had won,
not knowing that savage boy would grow
to savage man
and teach her his will –
tortured, wretched
Caliban.