Poor Collins sung the gradual, waiting,
Praying for Eve to arrive. And, while bidding
         For her, sure of failure,

At dusk the ambulance came
pulling all the way up onto the lawn
like a red speed boat drifting

With Pelléas and Mélisande, Claude
Debussy turned to sleeping figures:
the garden was growing cold, its trees

He was struck with awe at the sight of them:
a shoal lifting above the water's surface;
each head trained to his voice's timbre,

Even now I do not understand
the 5pat and hissed and murmured words
strangled out of throats in distant cells;

As a young man I was headstrong, willful, rash,
      Determined to amaze,
Grandly indifferent to comfort as to cash,

Fifty Hans Holbein heads
From the Queen's collection:
Wyatt and Surrey so real

A time comes of silence and secret Sargassos,
the desolation of tourists and billboards,
a time of seamless ennui:

My mind long gone, having forgot to shut the body
             off, I will lie in some spare room,
some former nursery, entranced by waiting for death

Who can't but love a soldier wearing mums
In his helmet? A colossal private
Produced a flask of something and toasted