Thought I might as well mark National Poetry Day, as I do write it occasionally. You know when you're a kid and you get the wrong end of the stick about something you've only heard about in passing? And then you never get disabused of the idea? This is about when I realised the Elgin Marbles weren't big round rocks. Yeah, I was an idiot. And about 25.
A Misapprehension
remembering the British museum
We’d taken
the whole day off I think,
escape via
annual leave. A virgin page
in a brand
new Moleskine journal, begging
to be filled
with our unoriginal musings
on culture
and art. ‘We have this great city
on our doorstep’.
‘A scandal’. ‘We really must’
‘Let’s be
one of those couples’.
I’d wanted
to see the Elgin Marbles.
Since
childhood years, I’d pictured those
huge cool
spheres. A giant’s game of Rolley Hole,
wasn’t the
wonder in how smooth they are?
The seventh
Earl called keepsies, when Greece
thought they
had been playing fair. [Of course,
rules should be decided in advance.]
‘Over here’,
you said. You realised, but didn't
smirk. My
eyes tracked the gallery,
bemused. A cathedral
aisle of polished floor;
supplicants
crowded the walls. Oh.
Marbles.
How could I
not have known? The blood
in my ears
felt thicker. Hot. Words buzzed.
Distorted,
in swimming pool air.
The sightless
fury of a centaur, remaining limbs
still striking
for the throat. That discorporate
mare. Poor
Ginger on the knacker’s cart,
tongue
lolling. Torsos missing only the gibbet.
Exposed to
time and air and public scrutiny.
No Arcadian
pursuit after all. Who’d have thought?
We bought
coffee and perched, high on stools.
