Laurie Duggan

ANGERS SUR MAINE

for Ian Brinton

There was once a fun-fair on this site –
a photo from the 1920s shows l’auto tamponnaise

across the city Babylon collapses,
frogs in the mouths of inhabitants,

fire, flood & locusts –
the fourteenth century knew this.

Under an old church
stone coffins radiate about a well,

north of the river a thunderstorm threatens.
We find an African bar. End up in a Japanese restaurant.

L'HELICE TERRESTRE

For Tony Baker & Liz Hanaway

an ‘earth propeller’
gouged from limestone

soft, damp, chalklike
a place bands could play in

if it all came to nothing,
the surface transformed

as in Lurçat’s cosmos
to dust and stars

in this placid department
known for its wine

its villages built on the levee
of a fast-running river

‘L’Helice Terrestre’ refers to Jacques Warminsky’s underground sculptural-site-as-dwelling in the Loire valley. Tony Baker assures me that bands have played there.

Laurie Duggan, b. Melbourne 1949, later a resident of Sydney and Brisbane, moved from Australia to Faversham, Kent, in 2006. His most recent books are Allotments (Shearsman 2014) and a reissue of his first two books as East and Under the Weather (Sydney, Puncher & Wattman 2014).