UNDERNEATH THE BUNKER

When I was a younger man, we used to live in a house with a long corridor. With dark brown walls and floorboards stained black, walking down it was a little like travelling through the centre of a tree. I do not lapse into the production of poetry very often, but when once I did, I imagined myself (in melodious verse, of course) as an ant, traipsing through a murky tube of bamboo. This corridor was my model.

It served other purposes also. In autumn, when the leaves embarked upon their customary exodus from the mother branch, I extended the joy of jumping on crisp piles of foliage to the letters that fell, with equal prolificacy – and with hurtful irony besides – upon my welcome mat. First I would collect these ungenerous letters, along with other sorry pages, and stack them loosely at the end of the corridor. Then, withdrawing to the far end of the virtual tunnel, I would dash along the given track, a living echo of those great Greek athletes of yore, a golden limbed sapling on the cusp of athletic maturity, shaking as I ran past the rare German prints (Gräup, mostly) that lined the walls, caring not for the frantic creaking of the floorboards, from the final plank of which I leapt into air at last, like a grasshopper from a leaf, cutting the air effortlessly, before falling with inconsistently heavy grace into the pile of guilty papers, which both suffered and – in some cases – scattered under the impact. Read the rest of this entry »