Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Someone will push the house over one day, Some spacedozer give it a shove, But the cobbles we laid down here in the yard, These are a labour of love. All winter we set these cobbles in place, Or was it the summer as well? Sorting through lumpy bluestone pitchers For ones that looked suitable. The old house decayed – along with us – Will a strange new resident Admire the patio made in joy Wondering what we meant? Things fall apart, the poet wrote, Certainties crumble and move But the cobbles oddly plotted together, These are our labour of love.

for Seamus Heaney Overture: violins: it is all scraggy, wideawake, ironical, decked out in denim fatigues. Witty and welcoming, leathery-evergreen, bemedalled with beercans, cowpat and wallaby-dung, flap, nub, hinge, node, blindeye quartzite, wafery sandstone, bright as a button subtle for mile on mile far from vulgarity (far from sleek Europe) in its array of furniture tonings sheeted by sunglaze lovingly dusted, wispy and splintery, tussocky, corduroy, all of its idiom dry as a thesis to moist outsiders: wonderfully eloquent on its home ground, branchful of adverbs, lovingly wombat-hued, dreamily sheeptoned, fluted with scalloping surf and every step a joke.

Suppose I were to eat you I should probably begin with the fingers, the cheeks and the breasts yet all of you would tempt me, so powerfully spicy as to discompose my choice. While I gobbled you up delicacy by tidbit I should lay the little bones ever so gently round my plate and caress the bigger bones like ivory talismans. When I had quite devoured the edible you (your tongue informing my voice-box) I would wake in the groin of night to feel, ever so slowly, your plangent, ravishing ghost munching my fingers and toes. Here, with an awkward, delicate gesture someone slides out his heart and offers it on a spoon, garnished with adjectives.