vi. Dinosaur Park


The bridges, also dinosaurs,
surround us
Before these newcomers,
Nuns danced under that Transporter,
In Hild's day,
when the bridge,
like two bittens kissing,
fell out of use,
became skeletal,
became norse hammers left frozen
in an out-of-date collision.

I said, they've played shove ha'penny,
scored goals with that bit of road
for so long, that they're contemplating
dominoes in the Fleece.

And the publican, liking a brawl,
will send them downstream,
past little girls begging,
learning rejections,
to Newport's drunken giants,
one each side, bum's up,
still trying to lift
that nailed-down plank.

We're on another bridge, says Adam,
an artificial mound, a pregnant hill,
see how the paths are mapped out round us
like a woman's tubes?
I'm quiet, it makes me feel constructed,
a tuppenny myth
dredged from slag-heaps.

It's King Arthur sleeping, he says,
thing of the furnaces growing in this hill,
the smelters underneath,
he's seized by the mechanisms
of an industrial phoenix
feathering these dinosaurs
like great metal birds.

We peddle trip-hammers
like piano keys, somehow
our blasé words bell on the steel,
on the whole landscape,
a carillon of metaphors that rise,
and unnoticed, fall with a lumpen thud.

Who are we fooling?
For the drunks
we're all implicated,
factories, people and dinosaurs
are one,
dammed in one
unemployed crumbling of a mouth
dammed to spew brick teeth
and bloodied mortar:
the bridge-building,
job-creating,
diced-carrot of Teesside.

And for the kids:
Triceratops is a gamelan,
they bang its spines with sticks,
make hooligan music
and the council
repaint.