Jan Owen: Two Poems

A Little Wine

I remember you, Dario,
courteous, long-faced croupier
who found me lost in the mist
on Verona’s vast piazza
with twilight rising from the cobbles,
and how you escorted me back
through the blurred grid of alleys
towards my door, unsmiling
—yes, perfectly poker-faced—
but stopping on the way
“per un bicchiere di vino?”
at the counter of a small cantina
walled with bottles, a cellar come up for air.
And how a hand glanced off the lampshade
so it swayed just over the heads
of a dozen strangers like a benediction.
So the red wine, held up, sparkled on and off
and the warm Italian vowels
circled below the moving halo of light
around the invisible centre
of which we were
that moment, the tangible signs.

Jan Owen

The Morandi Museum

Cream, taupe, terne, green,
cylindrical, squat, square—
are they ideas in mufti,
these calm families crowding in
to the coveted centre?
Silence incarnate,
emptiness replete?
They reflect on us passing through
the echoing room
or standing a moment
in twos and threes and fours—
tall, short, dumpy, thin,
brown coat, beige dress, grey suit—
as we mirror them.
They are not
clumped fungi,
Fez at dawn,
gulls on a quay,
not quarterly tables of profit and loss
nor stone bouquets
for a silent order of nuns.
These infernally lovable bottles and jars
are players in a waiting game:
they see through us
an afterlife of art,
white on white, unsigned, unframed,
pure presence
migrating to light.
Jan Owen