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He’s a composite figure,
but wouldn’t mind that. Expats,
poets, wanderers tend
to be or become compounds,
and he is all three. Likes ports,
whether cities or villages. Likes
to look at the sea from hills
and then from higher hills.
Stays, sometimes for years.
Finds someone unlike the last one,
and writes about her when he leaves,
and shows that to the next one,
who, whatever her language,
understands well enough. Their contempt
for him only slightly exceeds
his own, which pervades
his work like a mistral. When there’s war,
he arrives just after or leaves just before,
replacing “I” with bulletholes
in walls, stains on stones, and
the glimpsed emotional life
of some martyr. In poems, that is.
Two lines: *Since every bed, now, is rented,
no one can sleep soundly.*
Otherwise: his nostalgia for God
is less than for home or Communism.
Far from the critics he observes
the scene with undemonstrative disdain.
If we met he’d be charming, perversely
denying received wisdom, that only the poem
speaks. Of course I speak, he’d say.
Of course you want to hear *me.
And would in turn be charmed to learn
where I discovered him –
the unlikeliest shelf on earth,
between depressed antiques and spineless thrillers,
the discrepancy a measure of our worth.
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