The Hedgehog in His Element
Miserable, bullying, armed to the teeth,
like a Sherman tank forced out of the brush
or St Sebastian bristlng with his arrows.
Spring in Odd Weather
Not the dampness of opportunity, perhaps;
nor an irritating jumble of stimuli, choreographed
by some renegade Balanchine; nor
the particular razory liaison of May rain,
enough to muzzle the tits in the greening hedge;
nor the lofty bloat of ruined cloud
stalking the placid rape fields, which still
awaited an eighteenth-century painter
who had failed to show; no, these, not even
these could account for the whicker of spring chill,
the Commerce that muzzled her admirers in Art,
though above the fens, on the raw silhouette
of a hill – tentative, protracted, new-risen with weeds
like Iron Age spears – you stood your watch,
staring out in something like astonishment,
a porcelain doll blank in its own immortal gaze.
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