Ulysses becalmed
They were born to the soft life
like the boxed Apostle spoons, the hired
wet-nurse's milk, these rich young men:
for them there is no other spending
summers at the coast and New Year
larking on the ski-slopes, glamour
comes a right, doubt an impossibility.
They sprawl there, grouped by noon, by shade
splashed on the blankness of a beach,
with girls, aperitifs …
The thatched sunshade's the grizzled silver
of his four-day drunkard's beard,
while their lives seem as crowded
and adventurous as lives glimpsed
in a myth or an advertisement
each of them born with silver keys in hand
to flats in town and villas on the littoral,
to speedboats and handmade Italian cars:
so many keys to open women.
There is no coming of age
to their extended, playboy adolescence:
only age …
His glass makes closed circles,
like Olympic rings, in spillage
on the counter-top.
‘I too had fewer worries
than the gods until I went to god-built Troy.
Life was a credit-card cashed in on youth
against my father's name. I left a young
wife constant as the speed of light,
a boy of two, to fight for someone else's
slut. Now queueing to my bed
in Ithaca are beaux like these. I sit
becalmed and numb in gin, watching
their monied, actor's ease, and envy
them, wanting their girls.
Once,
in other lives, I had them, had
them all young whores too lithe, too
classy, too expensive to be bought, they
wanted me for who I was: a man
invited everywhere, who travelled
in straight lines … They loved me with
an awe-struck, stage-struck ruthlessness,
were pure romantics, arrivistes
still breathless with the jostle for arrival.
That was long ago … I was a king's son,
and I lived my life in profile
like a matador, a knife-blade.
Now nostalgia drags me down. I've lost
direction, and my days fly faster
than a weaver's shuttle. I'm a myth
crazed on a wine-cup.
I've come further
than the Pole-star to get drunk at
cafe tables, watch girls young
enough too young to be my own.
Idle,
I sit and weigh my tether's slack. I'm far
away, and passing middle age, and Ithaca
seems further than the womb.'
Page(s) 14-15
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The