Strictly protected. She’ll tell you the story
all came to her on a train. The owner will go to the papers,
gush about saving the table, but whine his first edition
can’t be found. The cultists will claim it was arson:
they have such quaint ideas, these people,
of causality.
The only place that got to print the legend
on its legend, since her brother-in-law’s property
became a Chinese buffet. Went on fire, they say round here,
with knowing intonation. Like the School of Art.
No word on Muriel’s location this time, but the spark,
they say, caught from the basement of the woman
in Room Four. Why don’t you come on over,
said the paintings and statues of Indian animals,
fetishised like Joanne’s mensa, shown off like Maratha
treasures plundered by the Royal Scots, sick of
being implicated in her veneration, sick of queues
of tourists, sick of chintzy white folks saying how exotic
it all looked, oh how Bohemian and quirky, longing
for some peace and quiet, they rejoiced to burn.
And if you’re picking through the ashes
and the rubble in the hope of finding footsteps
or forensic spoor, a connection to the photographs
retweeted from her door, you will not find them
where your eyes and fingers scrabble. But there is
a footprint here, which you cannot see the way fish
don’t see water. There are things
that move in ways we see
by implication only, that use people
as their moving parts, and happen
in a dozen or a hundred spots at once.
Take a ruler. Draw a line from here
to her Barnton house to Killiechassie.
Plot the times. Of course you can’t.
Some days you cannot see yet since,
to you, they haven’t happened.
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| Some things are bigger than elephants |
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