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Crossing Lady Stanley, here, 1868

You are ensconced in your vain folly
on the cliffs.    The wind would flatten
even your hair, Lady Stanley,
posed with your frilled infants.
before dinner you imagined yourself
to be Byron, stripped of his laughter,
self-glorified in a sunset of madness:

the cries of seabirds fell on each other
as so many colours fall at the horizon,
not considering the one below
shivering and settling in the shadow
of its transformation.
Now giant winds and giant darkness
outpower the tinkling cutlery of a family feast.

Your eyes illuminate the fat candles,
A manservant attends, and a mason or two,
for you want us to know what you did with all that money:
your name is everywhere, benefactress of hospitals
and churches; purveyor of lasting graffiti,
Kilroy of the marble halls.   Superseded
by Amlwch bootboys in rainy bus-shelters.

Last week, my friends probed your folly
and craned through your poor mock slits.
Lax feet turned the bean-tins in your monument,
half-curious, cameras in cases.
My face a necessary mask in a cutting wind,
I was laid flat in the heather; framed
in banks of cloud lay a lake of purest turquoise.

You stood at the edge of the colour, slight,
but there, as by the ballroom floor you might
have wanted to impress some well-lined beau.
Our minds moved together, a moment shared.   
You would have shuddered at the intimacy.
You had bought this view.    A carriage waited
on the mountainside, to remove it from you.    

I carried our intimacy back to the van,
a fragment of eggshell,
a peasant savouring the illicit
with a little smile of gratification.
Your driver too was waiting,
with his patient, leathery face,
an impenetrable landscape.

From Steve Griffiths’ Selected Poems (Seren, 1993)