Dickins and Jones

The last things sold, terminal transactions
of a hundred and twenty years of ringing tills,

cheques, warm silver and copper, credit cards,
small ceremonies of tissue paper and monogrammed bag

now all done, though the bronze name plates remain
there to the side of the doors; the row of faded

union jacks hangs lifeless in the leaden winter
air, vibrato of the Regent Street traffic failing

to raise even an answering tremor in the thin fabric.
In Liberty's, on the ground floor between Guerlain

and Balmain, the tall dark boy (the one who sold me
Shalimar last July, the weekend after the bombs)

says to his colleague They've stripped everything...
you can see at the edges of the windows. Everything.

Not the columns, I hope, not the rotunda, not yet,
the last grand magasin we had, once the others

lost themselves in a frenzy of retail reinvention,
highlighting, and frightening escalators; nowhere

now with the dark sinuous enticement Zola
pinned down in Au Bonheur des Dames, nowhere left

where you trail after veiled hats and bustles,
Poiret-style capes, gauzy handkerchief-hemmed

day dresses up the stairs, or in the wobbly lift,
to a cafe where friends have been meeting every week

for fifty years. Just decided to when we were girls
and now we're in our seventies. Lives gone,

marked by tea and pastries, searching for
pretty summer dresses or a nice autumn two piece.

All gone, the serenity of it, the halls I used
to dawdle through my first summer of being single,

finally with money to spend on myself, and
now my only relic the dark rose, sequinned scarf

kept in its white paper, the one I'd throw across
my desk at college before a full day's teaching

to remind me life still had something to offer.