snap
Is no one but me allowed
to define Englishmen
dismissively with limits,
Bloomsbury, Oxbridge?
Nobody's Oxbridge -
they take sides.
Is no one but me
allowed to remember
establishment brothers
on bored country Sundays,
rushed, refined
visits to Bloomsbury?
To make a life elsewhere,
submerged awareness
of their habits and foibles,
those different choices
in different climes
turned back on me?
Culture without fuss,
without narrators or steamers,
or European hotels,
without smart dining
and conversations
self-satisfied?
Books damp or crumbled
my thought free
of pointless edicts
in standard dictionaries
whose compilers take port
in an ancient hall?
Here, I can spare this bookmark
my father left in a book
by an Englishman.
I have halls enough,
grounds enough.
Flowers and words grow wild.
Sally Evans
http://www.desktopsallye.com
http://www.poetryscotland.co.uk
----- Original Message -----
From: "Max Richards" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 7:22 PM
Subject: snap: a bookmark
A Bookmark
The previous owner of this book
used for marker
this blurry snap.
It seems to show from above
a hotel pool, palm-trees,
a white surf beach,
long combers swelling lined-up
for their beach assault,
deepening blue beyond
intensifying to a dark
horizon, pale sky,
feathery spread of cloud.
The heads and pink shoulders
of four sunburn-risking
bathers can be made out.
Someone's holiday, receding
from that snapped moment
into vagueness.
The book? 'A Dance
to the Music of Time',
which for me so far
begins in vagueness,
characters stunted, noted
by a dim narrator.
Four pink Englishmen
shoulder to shoulder
stare from the cover.
Holiday reading?
disposable after merely
killing a few hours?
Yet the author laboured till
twelve novels queue forever
for their slow assault.
I'm told they'll become
an ocean I'll fondly swim in
and even feel at home in.
So be it. To think I once
longed to be an Englishman,
Oxbridge, Bloomsbury,
a 'New Statesman' reviewer,
toddling over constantly
to Paris, Florence,
Madrid, Granada.
Dining in season on
'pheasants from the best estates',
p'raps even helping slay them.
Not missing the warm
southern beaches of home.
'Don't go there', a doctor told me,
certifying in Edinburgh
I was employable in Melbourne.
'The heat will addle your brain.
You'll never achieve anything.'
How right he was. I taught
the unteachable, Wordsworth
in the sub-tropics, Pope
to the haters of wit,
Eliot to the enjoyers
of their waste land, Hawthorne
to the unhaunted. I lean
over the dazzling balcony here,
book in hand, classless, detached,
dim, dismayingly free.
Wednesday 21 January 2009
Max Richards
Doncaster, Victoria
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