Summer 1924
Bonnard cheerios down the snailshell path
Shaking the spots off a handkerchief - business in Paris
With his wife - leaving me, Claude,
Footboy and fiddle player to the chateau on the hill,
To dot the I and to cross the T on his security,
Gatekeeper to this unimposing house.
The angle of vision from the trundle-bed
Is just as he depicted it, we have the door,
Rushing to and fro, fitful sunshine buttercup,
Impressionable cut-and-come-again light,
The bang-on thuya tree duck-egg blue through pink,
Powdery, a fade of quick shadows
Changed by a single blast updraught,
And the garden, conscious as an animal,
Cringing its fleeces around twigs and railings.
Like the door the bedspread is a real kerfuffle
But the sexual touchpaper sizzles these tints.
For the seventh time I set the needle
To the gramophone - Trixie Smith’s
‘Choo Choo Blues’ is a rich spiral,
we immerse ourselves in trumpet and words,
the pleasure-giving Yves and I, we have become
sharp-eyed lovers, drinking from Bonnard’s cellar,
mournful for his return,
the day on which we part.
Page(s) 12
magazine list
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- Lamport Court
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- Monkey Kettle
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- North, The
- Oasis
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- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
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- Poetry London (1951)
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- Poetry Salzburg Review
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- Quarto
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- Reach Poetry
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- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
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- Shearsman
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- Staple
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- Thumbscrew
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