Before the Clocks Struck Three (Mr. Eliot Had an Apparition in Salford and It Was Very Foggy)

Before the Clocks Struck Three (Mr. Eliot Had an Apparition in Salford and It Was Very Foggy)

Salford is the rainiest place, getting  

Inside my shoes, wetting  

Tired feet in undarned socks.  

Yesterday, before the clocks  

Struck three, three old horses  

Munched wet grass  

Among the relics  

Of Clifton’s Wet Earth Colliery:  

Which on reflection,  

Were beautiful objects  

Of rust, time and toil.  

Fog swirls, curls  

Around the clock tower,  

The quays, the trees —  

Through bone-bare branches  

The spectral vapour slips.  

Mr. Eliot snorts,  

Presses a handkerchief —  

Greengate cotton, he insists —  

Tight against his reddened lips.  

Time, and time again.  

But this is no rhapsody  

On a windy night,  

But Salford on a foggy day —  

Arising like an apparition  

Amid grey towers.  

(Even that is too romantic,  

Too neat, too heavy  

On its feet.)  

Not the fragments  

Of European culture,  

Shored up against these ruins,  

No erudite Sanskrit,  

No Dante’s Inferno,  

No Buddhist sermon.  

Neither hollow men  

Nor matchstick men,  

But men  

In pubs, on the dole,  

In hoodies and tracksuit bottoms.  

They do the police in different voices.  

Now the fog whispers  

Through the colliery ruins,  

Seeping into hair and coats,  

Into doorways  

And the soil’s marrow —  

Covering, in grim decay,  

These shards  

Of poor English earth  

And the souls that lie beneath —  

Yesterday, today, tomorrow.