The rival

This was his room and now it's mine,
its oak desk solid as the made career,
the painting of the estuary by a local artist
still clear as the view from the wide bay
window. I knew him as a student,
the box of poems beneath his bed,
how he read Keats in the library
when he should've been in the lab instead.

It was the year with the prof
that got him this room, when she left
after her affair, how primed he was
to hold the empire, and to shine.
These are the shelves that held
his papers, eighty by the end
- he was the editor of the college mag-
the books for undergrads he wrote
on Cell Biology. and did he plan it
when he sat on the panel?

At any rate, funding was diverted
to his department, away from mine,
and people lost their jobs. He must have washed
his hands in this basin as if
they'd never be clean. He looked
for the best, or so he said.
He poached more like. He sucked
six post-grads from my boss's lab.
Worked hard? He delegated-
meant dumped on others
 - the credit to himself.

This is the square of sky
where he schemed, watched
clouds experiment with form
as lives were shaped. An irony
they said - they meant perversely sad-
he died of the leukaemia he studied.
But I know better. The paper weight
I got from "Budapest" came from Chernobyl.


He became his books, mutated cells,
as blackened as his own dark heart.
The view I'll have. The stone must go.
I declined his obituary, at first,
but pressure told - I knew him best -
put pen on page today and start to write.
The rest soon comes - "He did the work of ten.
bright beacon...an inspiration for the young."

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