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Matt Simpson

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Poem for David Porter

inarticulate day for you. In a cracked room
and a mean light, listening to Elgar. Liverpool
up to its usual carryings-on. And me with a poem
dropping in.
                   Both of us, as if
lamenting a grandad lost at sea,
nodding solemnly. You at the blank sheet obstinate
in your typewriter and me
no longer wishing to read my poem.

Thought you were me, some fifteen years ago,
or something very like. Wanting to be absolute
in loving everything this ragbag city had to say.
The poet of its poets, of those elusive certainties
that blow up from the river with cold smells.

We grow to different vulnerabilities in time,
other deceptions. The city has a different face
each year, each day. No less willing, we
grow more cautious about love.
Or am I rather talking of myself:

finding you, anxious for poetry, condoning the grief
in Elgar’s heart for something loved and lost?

 

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