POEM
S by
Irving Weinman
BYRON IN KENSINGTON
Nightime and ocean. Can there be more?
The fourteen year old girl undressed before
my eyes is unaware. I stare
through dirty windows at the smudge of hair
across the airshaft in the next big flat;
perhaps I dream the pubic hair, at that.
God knows I do my best to fill this too-big flat:
my pregnant wife sails in her tenth-month bed
alone, booms out her blanket like a Genoa jib;
the ocean moves inside her and she moans a bit.
I voyage through the toilet-tiled halls
into my empty study; empty though the walls
hang fat with books. I look about me
aimlessly, thumb through dumb anthologies
from Beowulf to James Baldwin: I'm caught by Lovelace–
"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage-"
I see dirty windows and dull red brick;
my subjective correlatives become cheap tricks. Shipwrecked
in
my armchair, I sip a vodka on the rocks.
Nightime. I read a reference to Byron in Balzac,
and Wilde's pathetic epigram about his life comes back
to mock the agony of third-rate poets' notoriety,
whose genius is in living, not in poetry.
Somewhere towards Holland Park a bell sounds one.
It
seems a warning houy in some Greek sea: alone
and floundering in Missolonghi, the last illusion gone,
the
deathsweat both a bedroom farce and classical Greek tragedy.
I
swim
to bed to thrash towards a receding shore.
Nightime and ocean. There
is
no more.
I
\
I
r
l
..
