HOMAGE TO VAUBAN

HOMAGE TO VAUBAN

HOMAGE TO VAUBAN

Today we are building sandcastles again.
We are on the beach, and it’s late May, though
the impermeable mist of drizzle
between the Maidens and ourselves says
March, or late October. Our forts have grown
ambitious now, use two buckets, just
wet sand, and grow in tiers and terraces.
Today you’ve learnt to tip the bucket

upside down yourself, and to prod windows in
the walls before you knock them down. Soon
you will stop knocking them down. Soon you’ll stop
asking me to build the castles for you.
Before you do, I tell myself, I want
to come down here some morning on my own
before even the wagtails, and build you
the sandcastle to end all sandcastles.

I’ll start with a ditch, an arm-deep hand’s breadth
jaggedly-angular figure of eight,
raise two mottes, and raise a keep on each, with
outbuildings, smithies, barracks, stables, all
the usual civic clutter at their feet.
Then crenellations and embrasures, gun-
slits, cannon-platforms, towers, revetments,
sangars, sally-ports, machicolations,

dungeons, oubliettes. By now the sun’s up,
limelight filtering through your blue curtains,
and when I wake you up and bring you down,
warm in your tousled musk, there is will lie.
You’ll still be young enough to think that’s how
the world is, that soldiers pace its ramparts,
peasantry bring cattle for protection,
that here’s the church and here’s the steeple. A cranked-

up portcullis yawns above its drawbridge,
a cock crows, a sleepy conscript
scratches his bollocks and stares dozily
up at the windowless treasury, counts
his own weight, his family’s weight, in gold.
You smile and ask if you can trample it,
and I can’t believe I say yes, trample it,
smash this bastion. Walk it into the sand.