Geoff Page: Three Poems

The Saturday Evening Post

 

Those Norman Rockwell covers

back there in the ’50s …

the Huck Finn boy with fishing rod,

 

those faithful black retainers,

the old men all avuncular,

the women straight from Doris Day

 

or suddenly advanced to grandmas,

a smell of cookies in the kitchen.

The draughtsmanship was so convincing,

 

the detail in the detail.

Inside would be the ads for what

we’d soon be calling “whitegoods”,

 

hygienic and efficient,

a measure of our “Modern Age”

like Popular Mechanics.

 

We knew, just entering our teens,

that, not long back, the U.S.A.

had “saved our ass”—but that was not

 

the term we used back then.

The Hit Parade arrived each week,

liltingly with splendid teeth.

 

Norman Rockwell caught it all,

some would say “invented” it—

those timeless, spare New England towns,

 

the mythic Mississippi.

Our parents spoke of Eisenhower

but not so very often.

 

Suddenly, in ’69,

we turned around and saw

The Saturday Evening Post had not

 

survived our disenchantment.

Geoff Page

 

 

The Shopper

 

Mostly we survive our clothes

but some, of course, outlive us.

That’s why I’m using op-shops now.

Interesting, how every year

there’s more and more that fits.

I think of all those vanished torsos

that once filled out the shirts,

the widows clearing built-in ’robes

then starting up the car.

Taken up or taken in,

such trousers are a windfall plainly—

the entropy of fabric v

the entropy of flesh.

Of course there’s stuff one wouldn’t touch—

ill-cut rayon, plastic shirts

that wear, despite a row of owners,

the sweatshop smell about them.

I still endure that sense of class

a boarding school bequeathed me

but worry rather less each year

when drifting through the racks.

I step into a cubicle

to see how well my shape will fill

a coat that once graced other shoulders

or pants abandoned by the dead.

Geoff Page

 

 

 

The History of Western Thought

For two whole days he disappeared.

The idea of the Dialectic

remained—but not his name.

1770–1831.

Quite the time to be alive,

the Bastille and the “Whiff of Grapeshot”,

Goethe, Schiller, Byron, Shelley.

My lazy galaxy of sparks

had cancelled him completely.

Wikipedia, I knew,

could trace him at a stroke

but that was not the point.

The syllables that sound his name

were no more than a cloud

below the curvature of mountains,

beyond all effort of the will.

The great idea was clear

but not the man who’d had it.

Only when I’d given up,

did Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

regain his place within

The History of Western Thought,

be-wigged and stockinged, resolute …

and not at all put out.

Geoff Page