Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
For Sarah Selzer
The arithmetic suggests you might have been
conceived on the night ferry to Dublin.
That, with a drive across the republic
in August, and a week of spuds and Guinness,
of Sweet Afton’s and of Passing Clouds,
of fuchsias, escaped from some gentry’s garden,
purpling wild and red down narrow lanes
where family men fought a ragged war,
rocks at Hell’s Mouth, white and bleached as bones,
the lullaby lapping of Bantry Bay,
Past Songs of Yesteryear, Mystic Morgana,
and other booths – purveying Flags of the World,
Country & Western Memorabilia,
Decorous South Sea Shells, Home Made Welsh Fudge;
past the sustainable hardwood benches
with withered in memoriam bouquets;
over the planking with its measured gaps
through which to view, like a bioscope,
the incoming tide shimmy then shake
the fronds of bronze weeds among the rocks,
slap, strike the elegant, cast iron stanchions;
next to where even the line fishermen
are starting to stow their gear,
Past Songs of Yesteryear, Mystic Morgana,
and other booths – purveying Flags of the World,
Country & Western Memorabilia,
Decorous South Sea Shells, Home Made Welsh Fudge;
past the sustainable hardwood benches
with withered in memoriam bouquets;
over the planking with its measured gaps
through which to view, like a bioscope,
the incoming tide shimmy then shake
the fronds of bronze weeds among the rocks,
slap, strike the elegant, cast iron stanchions;
next to where even the line fishermen
are starting to stow their gear,
After the reading, we strolled down Brownlow Hill
for a Guinness and a chaser at The Vines
next to The Adelphi on Lime Street –
a Walker’s pub in Edwardian baroque.
The westering sun lit the stained glass windows.
We were both young men then. He had been married
the year before. I would be married
later that year. His first book had been published
by Faber and Karl Miller’s prescient review
seemed genuinely to bemuse and amuse him.
KEEPING THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING
'CROSSING THE BROOK': J.M.W. TURNER
THE OLD RAPTURES
THE OLD RAPTURES
THE OCCASIONAL JUBILEE