"Watch out!" I said, and bravely held you back
imagining scorpion-tail, and bull-ant jaws,
and cripes knows what; but you twisted my grip,
gave me a green glance and danced your gum-boot dance
around the fearsome mound of earth,
then confidentially said, "It's a molehill."
Molehill, eh?
It means, No-Worries-Mate, and She'll-Be-Right;
but what about the other stories I've been told?
What about Hamlet's dad, the burrowing ghost
who blew up Elsinore with its own petard?
All of that? Even Ratty and Mole,
after mucking about in match-box boats,
would make a bigger mound that this?
But I didn't argue; only human; I adapt.
Besides, there'd be better opportunities than this
to niggle you for Englishness and pommery.
I slipped an arm around your plastic mac
and nuzzled your rain-slicked hair, sipping
the rain-water runnels at your lips.
Nothing like salty skin on Bondi Beach;
but cold-climate-love isn't so bad.
And we walked out along the dyke
with a wide, wide sea of mud and marsh below,
and, on our other side, the hurrying
river-in-the-sky sent here from higher ground
with instructions to look neither left nor right,
to resume no farms, to collect no taxes
but to go straight out and dispose itself
into the Norfolk Broads and the savage North Sea –
names, names, names – known from their stories,
but I find I know little of the things themselves.
So you told me of the black button-nose
and the tidy black paws: of the earth-loving mammal
that's averse to open air and does not swim.
He's trapped below these heavy winter clouds,
and caught above the rising, seeping flood.
These have left no cosy space for him
to nudge apart the grains of soil. Or her,
as you said. I burrowed at your neck.
We walked past a dinky little cottage.
A character cottage: a midget curled in catatonia
with two shuttered eyes over tiny viewless chambers;
and no wonder – the poor bloke had been dug in
underneath the dyke: all those centuries of dreams
with flood-waters brimming overhead.
Drive anyone mad.
But back to moles:
I didn't mean to avoid the subject,
which is sex, of course;
but you English take so much for granted.
I can't walk past such oddities: the people
who live like moles; the flood-waters held
above their plain. If you don't want it,
why not send this river around the globe
on vaulted viaducts through the stratosphere
to us, to dusty Aussies in the Antipodes?
But I digress.
In the nights that followed,
our bodies rubbed these daytime differences
between us, rubbed them fine and warm and pliable,
and I nosed a way inside you
just like a blind, sinuous ball of sleek, black fur;
and I like this last story as well as any.