2000

Twenty years on, they still thought of the cheese,
the cable car into the pale horned mountains,
the trek over rocks to a roadless village,
the baseless rumours of maggots and manure,
the unmodern woman who would only sell them
a lump of it like a keystone, which oozed in its bag,
had to be dangled from hotel windows,
the grottoes of blue mould concealed within it,
the acid tang of it, the crumble, the long finish
of flavour in the throat, their mild unease
at memories of the lows, the lows of cattle
from windowless old barns in wide green valleys.