captain of the Lions on their finest tour

against the Boer, that, and a leather-

bound set of Somerset Maugham

he’d bought by accident at auction,

thinking he was bidding on

a lovely solid oak sideboard.

(Chastised by a Shining One)

David, I am getting to it.

If you would give me just a minute.

An ability to pull the graceful pint and tend

a bar I owe to you, my useful skill,

and the one which saw me mostly liquid

through my college years and law school.

You had come back for a spell from Australia

to see Annie, your mother, who’d suffered a scare,

and even there, by that, showed me the ropes.

(Fierceness of the Lions)

(BTW MacBride’s test series was won

three-nil with one game drawn. Management,

noting how the Saffas liked to browbeat

their opponents with physical aggression,

and aware a player’s substitution

was only possible if a doctor

certified him unfit to stay on the pitch,

and since there were no sideline officials

or cameras to keep punches and kicks

and headbutting to a minimum,

determined on the strategy that if

a Springbok should start to come

the big man and chance his hand, the Lions

were to call ninety-nine as a signal

for the entire team to fly in

hard with elbows and studs and fists,

acting as a single animal,

and get all of their retaliation in first.)

(Mr Malice)

If you’re interested, a neat routine

for experiencing a fair selection

of the atoms of the known universe

is just to breathe in, and wait a bit,

and then breathe out, and as I do this,

I’m listening to Miserere mei, Deus

on repeat, and sitting back in bed

in Rome, in my fourth-floor walk-up

five minutes’ stroll from that unlighted

and very cool interior with a Caravaggio,

above the basement room they brought Galileo to

and showed the instruments they’d use:

thumbscrews, the rack, the brodequin,

the judas cradle, the prayer stool . . .

The recording’s sung in the cathedral

of the city I arrived in one thundery wet

Sunday night already late and homesick,

if adamant on working out how best

I might defect, how else I might backslide

on god and spurn the tribe and go outside

and slam the door behind me, hard.

I would set forth as music might

the history of the province, I mean

with passion and without meaning.

(Reliever)

I mean once more with feeling. I mean

Allegri composed it at the commission

of Pope Urban, who reserved it for use

in the Tenebrae service during Holy Week,

that 3 a.m. sequence when the candles

are extinguished in the Sistine Chapel

one by one, until a single drop of flame

remains – and it is a fine baroque example

of how successfully the choral template

might adjust itself to fit an elliptic

non-contiguous life, since it embodies

what it indicates, and so the unison is

queried repeatedly with descant:

four songsters counter five – one slow chant