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