Poem
The ice-cream headache has you seeing double
as Goody Twoshoes calls by your table to arrange
some kind of smooth-talk conference full of limitless
possibilities, lots of cocktails, two naked men and naturally
Much as I loved you in the snow and ice,
Side-slipping down the chute below Spinale –
It’s twenty years now since we saw Madonna
(Di Campiglio, not Ciconne)
And once again that field of neutral light,
Those same few vessels subtly rearranged
Across the surface of a table,
The pots and bottles, vases, with a slight
Apart from those
occasional wrinkled socks
you are aristocratically pallid
'Osip Mandelstam and Rosemary Dobson: A translation', a new poem by Rosemary Dobson
And on my travels I came across
a boy holding his purple heart
in his hands like a broken cup. I touched
the handle – it turned into a bluebird
The Captain’s keen to explore, go deeper,
Take core samples, measure astronomical tilt.
He says the clues are down there and the truth;
Our forebears, numerously well-preserved,
at 86 and 91 they are still together
more or less
and greet me at the door
as if I am the punchline to a joke
they were just recalling
I walk toward a paddock bordered by cypress trees.
Philip Hodgins is on a tractor harrowing forty acres.
I can’t see his face but I know it is him
methodically going about his business,
Friends knew he lived alone
in an old fashioned block of apartments
with large windows facing the sea
and a lift like a lion’s cage