Five Poems

Snip-Snip

Your grand plans fill the interim.
She asks the simple questions first:
“Back-and-sides? Or just the trim?”
Although she may not be their worst

 

you worry just a bit about her
deftness with the implements.
Is it really fair to doubt her?
One never likes to give offence.

 

Her hands, you find, are not unkind.
She edits neatly round an ear.
You nod off, more or less resigned—
then wake to what all poets fear:

 

an epic head with not much on it;
the odyssey snipped back to a sonnet.

 

 

Tribal

I like the ironies of empire,
the tributes paid to the defeated,
the tone of the official poets,

 

their images of palm and pine,
the satisfactions of the map,
the sun which somehow can’t contrive

 

to leave a single slice unlit,
the bureaucrats in sleepy outposts
nodding in the sun.

 

Most of all I find I like
their sweet nomenclature, e.g.
the “Tribal Class” destroyers which

 

patrolled their final years,
sporting all those humbled names,
some more fierce than others:

 

the “HMS Mashona” say,
the “Iroquois”, the “Bedouin”
the “Zulu” and the “Matabele”.

 

Even those who walked unseen
the great south land that no one owned
were offered up a guernsey by

 

some admiralty clerk:
the “Kurnai”, the “Arunta”,
mispronounced, of course.

 

How sleekly they divide the waters;
how neatly angled are the guns;
how gracious are the names.

 

poco giocoso
i.m. Peter Porter

 

What did those great composers feel
out there in their summerhouses
(or garrets when less lucky)
adding their “expression marks”
to ink-spots on the stave?
Did Mozart and Mussorgsky

 

just love Italian vowels?
Did Verdi really think con fuoco?
Were such marks a pedantry

 

(moderato ma non troppo)?
or sticks to beat conductors with
(prestissimo con furioso)?

 

Was it for their very sound,
no less resonant than strings:
(the endless steppes inside a largo,

 

a morning coffee served con brio)?
Did they think mere words would do it?
The emperor strutting grandioso—

 

shame about the clothes.
“All poetry aspires to music”:
Stéphane Mallarmé.

 

Adagio or presto, Stéphane?
Or just cantabile?
Allegro = brisk spring day.

 

There, above the rostered dots,
the words themselves
know what they say.

  

Bacon and Eggs

Three times, all up, I would have met him,
and twenty-four years gone,

 

this poet in my sleep last night,
the scene like Jimmy Watson’s,

 

enriched by fumes of alcohol,
red wine, I presume,

 

a table and some stiff-backed chairs,
the varnish flaked and cracking.

 

Leonine’s the word I’d use
from back there in his thirties,

 

way before I knew him,
as in the sketch by Louis Kahn,

 

no sign of the transparencies
that thinned his final years,

 

as, suddenly, he started reading,
a late one, taken from

 

the files they found in his computer,
steady four-stress lines,

 

unrhymed tetrameters about,
I think, the joys of driving

 

home when gloriously drunk—
though he himself, I’d always heard,

 

had never owned a licence.
Turning vaguely priggish,

 

I may have used the word unhelpful.
Our circle also held

 

a pair of Chinese students who,
when everything was finished,

 

failed to be impressed. I watched
the poet in his chair,

 

solid and so far from dead.
“What do you miss most?” I asked.

 

“Bacon and eggs,” he said.

 

 

Edwardian 

Edwardian, let’s say;
his mother losing too much blood
and lingering a week,

 

his father not re-marrying;
then those first few years with nanny,
followed by the governess,

 

the boarding school with sleety fields
and Oxford at the end.
“Eminently eligible”,

 

the great-aunts used to say—
with “nothing of that funny stuff
that finished Oscar Wilde”.

 

They’d promenade their protegées,
demure, or just a bit more knowing,
but none could hold his eye—

 

although a few, it’s said,
considered they’d been flirted with.
Years on now, he has his interests

 

but nothing more demanding;
he’s seen a play by Bernard Shaw
and read a book by Nietzsche.

 

His Greek these days is fading;
his Latin rather less so:
he smiles at Martial now and then.

 

He’s done the Grand Tour twice at least—
and come back unaffected.
He likes the slump of leather chairs

 

in which to read The Times,
his club’s small shock of single malt
before the gong for dinner.

 

His valet, Ferguson, in Chelsea
keeps his rooms in order.
He talks a little with his friends,

 

the chaps he knew at Balliol,
but hasn’t their “get-up-and-go”,
their fever for the Commons,

 

their hankering for well-bred eyes
or servant girls and modern money.
His father’s in a big stone pile

 

up there in Worcestershire
with half a dozen dozy servants,
letting whisky take him.

 

One day, not far off, he’ll need
to sort that business out.
A tribe of J.M. Barrie children

 

romping through the empty rooms
might once have been an answer
but here inside the club

 

it’s all a men’s affair:
butlers, waiters, maître d’,
the women off-stage, down below

 

tending to the cauldrons.
His nanny, rather loved, is dead;
the governess found other work—

 

or so he’s understood.
She too, it seems, was not for marriage.
The debutantes he once was shown

 

are mistresses of mansions now,
having their affair or two,
their “weekends in the country”,

 

and trying not to say too much
when husbands slip out now and then
with slender explanations.

 

The world is as it always was;
will bear no alteration—
although, these days, he’s not much asked

 

to grace their grand salons.
Hard to feign an interest really
in anything so idle.

 

A faithful tailor in Pall Mall
keeps his measurements exactly
and doesn’t talk of women.

 

A lawyer for the family,
and rather more uxorious,
attends to the accounts.

 

“Misanthrope” is just a word.
The club is where he’s happiest,
the rituals and order,

 

the well-worn chairs, the newspapers,
the waiter with a second whisky,
the call to dinner in good time,

 

the nights back home in bed alone
but somehow less than lonely.
Ferguson remains polite

 

and has no problems with his station;
is certain to turn out the lights.
It’s winter now, the warming pan

 

has done its job again.
He wonders where they can have gone,
those nymphs who vanished from his life,

 

sweet creatures surplus to requirements.
His mother though remains a sadness.
These last few nights, the dream’s come back …

 

he’s floating in the amniotic
a day or two before his birth,
stalled in that still-dreaming world

 

above the birth canal,
the sides of which he’s almost sure
his temples can remember.