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M. Levene

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Ageing Novelist

He was overtaken by a melancholy.
He stopped and reasoned with it,
but was seduced by the reasoning,
admiring it like fine weather, not his own.

Three years dead, his wife had now advanced
into the massive edifice of History,
awesome, definitive, yet growing,
propogating undreamed-of affinities.

Then other women, three, much younger,
so aroused by his solitude, by a kind
of duty to inspire - he was, in fact,
consoling them, avoiding cliches, so he thought;
they had, he knew, misread him, would never
see his notebooks, perhaps not even enter them.

For the first time in his life he saw himself
as odd, provincial, mediocre. He overheard
his words sometimes: they sounded written.
And others spoke what he thought he had said.
Was he losing his ear? Distorting the world?
His eye would rest on the spines of his seven books,
and he found himself repeating ‘Not much harm
done.’

And obituaries, he knew, would talk of detachment,
of ripeness; or cynicism, mental laziness,
complacency,
while the truth … Ach, the truth was just
this inescapable vanity of his again,
no more to be discussed by any art he could summon
than the white page by his dark, angular script.

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