West Kent Youth Theatre Party
1986
Olly, with spiky hair and open jerkin,
Hosts a party at his parents’ house,
A red-tile-hung old forge with hobbit ceilings.
After the stage’s tense indulgent lights
We pack the chairs and chair arms, floor and stairs.
There is fast-circulating silver laughter
Above some earnest talk in twos and threes
About A levels, interviews and love.
Later, my father’s long brown car draws up
And I climb in. He waves to Olly’s dad.
Cigarette tang, and in the glove compartment,
Travel sweets dusted in the softest sugar.
His eyes are joyful with the feel of life.
These are good days. He knows the short way home.
In an Oxford Antiquities Shop
Roman oil lamp with erotic scene
Such images left moderns mortified:
A man and woman rear in ecstasy.
This oil lamp was a talking point and guide.
Now blurred by time, near where the flame once played,
The figures keep a kind of privacy,
And grow more universal as they fade,
Showing the dreaming and imagining,
The sameness and distinctiveness of lovers.
Over a thousand pounds for this old thing!
I pass thick colleges while hurrying home,
And find you waiting deep within the covers
Where soon we are rebuilding ancient Rome.
Rembrandt and Hendrickje
Paintings in the National Gallery
Rembrandt sees himself, even when young,
Cavalier golden hairs in his moustache,
With a slight petulance that just might weep
And wince at the disguises age puts on,
The furs and hair, the skin like cracking paint.
But close by is a picture of Hendrickje
Who looks out with unbounded tenderness
At Rembrandt as he paints her. In this third,
That stream might be the first one in the world,
So curiously is she stepping through
Its pliant softness, rippling gown held high
Here in his studio. When she looks up
Is his face glowing too now they’re alone?
The clattering maid has left, and glassy grapes
Are piled in cupboards next to ragged bread,
As through flawed windows, wheels tilt by on cobbles
By flies and scattered straw, far from this room.
Staying with Mabel
In memory of Mabel Westmorland
Reaching into the bag, sand-soft, dark green,
Meant mystery and risk, a clack of runes,
Though no cruel fates were spelt, but word on word
Like gentle, aunt and love in afternoons
When much was scrupulously kept unseen,
Schisms and losses anciently incurred.
Mabel displayed intent subdued prowess,
Mastering wits and chance. Her scores would spell
Roars of delight. She was the centre star
Loud Euston led us to in Motherwell.
Though customs altered, and I saw her less,
Each year she sent the Scotsman calendar:
Turning the pages of the last, I see
A summer castle, peaks in fine-sieved snow,
Pristine romantic harbours in the Isles,
Light-casting lochs, and grids of days below
Like frames of film unrolling emptily
Or racks of now unlettered Scrabble tiles.
*
(These poems were first published,
sometimes in earlier versions, in
The Spectator, The Dark Horse and
Temenos Academy Review.)