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Spectare’s Humours
In guzzle holes, by calcareous cavern walls and seep-filled pools, under drip-feeds of stalactites and subcutaneous flows, Dr. Spectare brushes against thick burred dark. His torch-beam picks for shy familiars. A Trichoniscoides saeroeenis, perhaps? O Androniscus dentiger, the joy! You pink senatorial wood-lice, blind isopod familials of Tacitus. Doomed noble Romans of generation! Spectare speleologist ( at weekends ) hard boots out for ancestral limestone, tracking aquifers on stream-bed cobbles. Underground in June, his dry skin itches and persists, trailing for the small lives, for a patchwork of Latin common under stone. At night he scribbles out his pocket-book, indexing annals to histories like Rome’s, to the stony lines of Animalum Cavernarum Catalogus. He motors home late, along mist stroked trunk roads and sodium colonnaded M-ways. Home late to eczema and following office computers and Monday’s arid inflorescence of up-lights.
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