THIGH-BONE OF A DEER
The quality of sunlight. I mean the quality of light
On a morning in Iowa when you can’t even remember
What you had for breakfast or even if you had
A breakfast. To float. To be young and to have broken
Free. Linden trees float above you in a lacuna
That youth has made just in time, before all of Ireland
Might have been lost to your care-worn childhood.
Coffee and the scent of cinnamon under pale leaves,
The cinnamon of Iowa City, the coffee-cup
Replenished by a boy you still don’t recognise as gay,
A sweetheart of a boy who misunderstood a gesture
Or a word or your ability to quote C. P. Cavafy
And all the brittle poems from a sunlit room
In Alexandria. Was Rae Delvin a boy or a girl?
How little you know of her burning, sunlit pages.
What you are thinking of is a girl with brown eyes
In a lost poem from another language, a poem
As delicate as a small boy with woman’s eyes.
You are now afloat in the long American summer
After Vietnam when all of the burning issues
Became personal things. The best poets in Marvin
Bell’s workshop dream of watching for fires in a forest
South-east of Seattle: they must choose, for career,
To follow Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanack,
But you must choose a girl or boy fashioned from
The windswept thigh-bone of a deer. It is sunlit
Beneath these pales trees in Iowa. It is so far away
From that Irish world of wars and memoirs, from
That elderly man you knew, wearing a lemon waist-coat
And a frayed Guards tie and a scratched tank-watch
With a blue and red canvas strap. I think that man
Must have been the youth the elder loved when
He and him were very young. The housekeeper back
Home said they were both handsome but inaccessible:
I didn’t know then what her tone of voice meant,
I mean her own settled and married intonation
That crackled down the line from a damp, tied cottage.
A full-size bronze of the god Hermes, a very
Expensive purchase from Artemis S.A.
Of the protector of merchants in a classical
Lysippan pose, was all the rage in the household
That summer of ’78. The sculpture was
Something that defined them both, both who’d parted
Long after the housekeeper had been forsaken, and
Long before the hope of romance had returned
To Europe. That pause when Al Bowlly went silent,
Waiting for all dancers to turn and regroup
On the old vinyl that I’d rescued from among things
In a life he’d once lived, that pause of the Ray Noble Orchestra,
Seemed like the muffled ‘plurp’ of the Chateau
Lafite ‘45 his lover had brought and insisted they open.
In my life there were brilliant new openings:
This promise of sunlight in Iowa, all that cinnamon
And these coffee cups borne by persons whose names
I couldn’t remember even then, but in his long life –
Ebbing away from me as our Pan-Am Jumbo
Banked in a holding pattern over Chicago, in his life
It seemed like the end of one long season
In Mayfair, the end of wine as deep as 20-year old
Tawny Port; of a deep love known once, of such
a Cru; of such a compote of Cavafy, tannin and art.