Alan Gould: Two poems
Yeats
“Bred passion against the times, made wisdom strong.”
—A.D. Hope
Lucid dandy, curing words
to shoe your dears with skins from birds,
preposterous those haughty loves
candlestick’d in fish-skin gloves …
yet who dare quiz your mundane wish
to stitch the fabric of a fish
(be it trout or moonlit elver)
that Irish girls might sleeve in silver …
or walk the leather from a sparrow
in sandals that can warm the marrow
of their exquisite anklebones
on chill Monaro afternoons?
Here was the glint you gave me, William,
from all your wise and headlong bullion …
that only paltriness in love
could stint my darling trout-skin gloves.
Praise genius that has nous to spree
with reasoned magic for company
such that the madcap and the sane
might tête à tête within one brain,
might tit-for-tat this side of sane.
Shakespeare
The Droeshout Portrait
I get this rictus for your face,
high collared Dude.
Where is your warm by which we punters press
on you some gratitude
when on my fingers
the leather smell of Iago lingers,
and Falstaff, burling from a tune,
inhabits light I call my own?
Here Bardolph squints,
here Shylock dabs some fussy scents,
and these come natural on my street,
escape your little whiskers when we meet.
O you had knack
to find iambic yakkity yak
could pinion how morale might curl and pulse
to limn a self with all its else.
I praise your sense
to seize on each intelligence,
and from their sum make ground where I belong,
your scrutiny so sidelong.
Alan Gould
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