Last Weekend in Devon

Moving through the gentle breast-like undulations
Of this grassed lushland,
Damp to the red earth that smells of healthy holidays,
One feels one’s eyes begin to open wider
And the blood run faster,
hotter, through its favourite courses.
Rain falls like a gift here,
Rapping on the window like a drunken lunatic
Gesticulating wildly, “Come outside,
And dance in the nude to the sounds of the wood
In the night time.”

Night is blacker here, and fire hotter.
Outside rain lashed scars across the dunes,
And eastward swells crashed thunder on the shore,
While burned the conflagration, round the which we smoked and sang,
And danced and sweated, shouted, grasped
and stared into the nearest eyes available.
This gathering of dense combustible souls being quorate,
Battened down the hatches, and prepared for immolation.

Next day I lost my way in the sculpture park
And ruined my good suede shoes in the sea-green grass.
Behind the crumpled bush I found
Europa writhing on the back of Zeus, the bull, her
Black-blue bronze thighs bound round the
Meaty back bearing her to Crete, and thought
How hard and solid, how unlike my sodium flare visions
of you; and how unlike
The pale limbs of the lank-shanked Nordic goddess at the wedding,
Barefoot, unbridled, hot and white,
And tracing blurry shapes in arcs around my vision,
Seized by the second and fourth beats of the bar.

This is a Sunday of long goodbyes and tepid rain.
Cars reverse and three-point-turn towards the motorway,
Each one an air conditioned carapace, protection from
The wild windcries of this screaming, cold-sweating county.
Inside them couples reaffirm their house styles and
comfortable, hungover silences,
But I am shuttled miles away from here
By the Utahan girl I drove to Heathrow, telling of the
Visions of Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon,
And the bright, broad, shining strip-malls of Salt Lake City.