From here we can just
make out
a platoon of Light
Infantry going down
the road to the accompaniment of a pipe-
band. The sun glints on their silver-
buttoned jerkins.
My uncle, Patrick
Regan,
has been leaning against the mud-guard
of the lorry. He levers
open the bonnet and tinkers with a light
wrench at the hose-pipe
that's always going down.
Then he himself goes
down
to bleed oil into a jerry-can.
My father slips the pipe
into his scorch-marked
breast pocket and again makes light
of the trepanned cauliflowers.
All this as I listened
to two lovers
repeatedly going down
on each other in the next room . . . 'light
of my life . . . ' in a motel in Oregon.
All this. Magritte's
pipe
and the pipe-
bomb. White Annetts. Gillyflowers.
Margaret,
are you grieving? My father going down
the primrose path with Patrick Regan.
All gone out of the world of light.
All gone down
the original pipe. And the cauliflowers
in an unmarked pit, that were harvested by their own
light.