Old Haunts

1966

See where he stands,

Glorious to behold,

Like some Roman God

Flushed with the spoils of life,

Re-entering the shrine of youth,

Resplendent in old school tie.

And, in his mind,

The bridge of time

Is idly spanned,

Back to the lost cities

Of his youth.

As he passes,

Small boys wonder at his bulk;

He marches on in state,

Down the halls of yesteryear.

The Prodigal Son

Returns to his own.

Brotherly Love

Gestingthorpe 2011

I won’t call you eccentric,

Though we are related.

Your house is full of shards

Gathered from feudal fields

Whose names you know:

Cracked pots and cauldrons; rusting scythes

That would have done a revolution proud.

You sit by the window,

Discussing love, divorce,

Beethoven’s debt to Haydn,

And the fusing of plain and mannered style

In Shakespeare’s verse,

As acres turn dark.

I ask what you mean

By filling your garden with rocks,

Glacial erratics:

Remnants of conflicts

That progress ignores.

Feng Shui, you say,

Hand sweeping the night,

As though that were obvious.

Outside, in the moonlight,

A shriek owl responds;

And the long walk home

Appears less travelled

Than before.

Making Sense

Our ghost liaison lasted seven years.

Luck or damnation, I’m not sure which.

I still find ectoplasm between my toes

And, now and then, sense

Your image in the glass.

Beer glass, you’d probably add.

I can still hear your voice:

Who’d love you,

If they knew you first?

Mistakes do happen,

Of course.

You spooked me out,

While teaching me the secret of the universe

Amnesia prevents

Me from recounting.

No help to alchemists perhaps;

But what makes me glad

Is that, for a moment in time (where else?),

In your ethereal arms,

Mortality made sense.