John McAuliffe

swans The arc of the driveway is what’s left, where someone built a house and tended a lake to walk beside, discussing politics and how a tree moves in the wind. Its music is a jetty drifting away from the boathouse whose rolled-shut metal door tricks visitors into thinking it holds a life raft. The house drifts beyond its purpose, is demolished for a car park and picnics and returns in a special room, small, sturdy, becoming anonymous as its windows empty, enormous insects swanning around — they own the place — occasionally stunning themselves on the glass. secretarial The country, sometimes, still appears to ask to just be taken down, even by a tourist, on no one’s side, a tourist lost at home, blue book open, ticking off each task. But when old Colin, in pajamas, explained how I could evade the barbed and electric wire that fenced off fields and the bull let loose to scare the stranger off (I’d stopped to ask for directions), I was ready to wade through cowshit and knee-high grass to see if the poet, long abroad, was written in the ruin’s native life. Colin stopped me then, leaning on the open door of the Renault— noting first the English registration I’d parked outside his roadside bungalow, and said his father hated that his mother called him Colin, but he’s the one who stuck it out. No one, it seems he had to tell me this, no one belonging to them ever had to go over to England, a sally he follows up with a question about where I live, before naming the man on whose land the castle rested: we do nothing, he says, but damage what we inherited, bulldozing the medieval church and causing the collapse of the foxhole the settler and his family used, legend has it, to make, under a smoldering fire, their escape. This new heir has his eye on the castle, no doubt. It will soon be more literature than history. We are not all the same, he said. I recall, at the edge of the clearing, the grant’s nice clause saying the poet had a right to possess new areas discovered by his survey ... To belong, a moment’s authority is nothing.