Belgium

Near Dronkaard in the province of Vlaams-Brabant,

Flanders, four business men in a Rover car

swept through the border into Belgium.

The Flanders Fields flashed by the autosnelweg to Ghent

and the language of road signs was Flemish.  But maybe

there never was a road to Ghent though the night train

could have sped into Liège south west of Aachen.

Brussels, the Grand Place soot encrusted buildings

with pale boned facades like well-drilled guillemots

on a cliff, a chiaroscuro of filigreed stone seen through

the November rain of an Émile Verhaeren poem

from the shop of a celebrated chocolatier.  For all

the grandeur a small dark fondant is the heart’s desire.

Such overpowering experience make it hard to plan

an agenda for a day when I can watch green fig leaves

trembling as the raindrops fall on them.

Moules aux chicons at La Villette

red and white checked tablecloths

someone said Belgians were both apes and molluscs

mussel shells like seabirds’ beaks, blue black backed

with a nacreous lining cradling wet pale caramel flesh

bounded by a seaweed-coloured string

in round white soup plates rimmed with crimson.

Brown crimson too was the local cherry beer, dark and bitter.

Botanic Garden Meise satanic bromeliads, sticky

purple-throated in the glasshouse-trapped tropical mist

a woman in a laboratory coat tended her treasures

while in the surrounding park the garden director

drove his car at three white geese leaving them crushed

and dead - no love lost between geese and directors

or between Fleming and Walloon.

Sometimes the past peeps over the parapet of now.

I found on my tongue a fragment of yellow oat straw

from my morning biscuit.  What are we going to trade? 

Bombs for oranges?  Tanks for redbush tea?

such stray thoughts slip into my mind tariff free,

like polished poison arrows.

Glutinous nausea after the Salon des Jardins

crouched in a room gleaming with dark brown wood

and garden writers, unable to eat duck with wild cherries

congealing in its gravy on the plate.