Friday 26 June 2015

Philip Larkin


That was Philip’s room

For you, it was always the lonely interior
At nine o’clock the curtains would be drawn
On the starched damask and flock wallpaper

Note the imprisoned begonias and the neat lawn
A study in sepia, some Highland scene –
Antlers and crepuscular melancholy

Everything here is cream or mushroom brown
Nature is subdued by suburban irony
Such houses have been lost to history

Old sheet music curls on the piano stand
If only the wild notes of some New Orleans band
Could impose upon this Victorian gentility

Through an open doorway I can picture you:
The tea-rings, the ash-burned coverlet
The stacked discs, your well-thumbed library

That was Philip’s room. I can imagine
Your history – faded and nicotine yellow
The dog-eared porn, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury


Phil and Ted

The church authorities are to place a memorial to Philip Larkin in poet’s corner in Westminster Abbey, close to Ted Hughes, the last poet to be so honoured

Why would they put your slab next to his?
You the melancholic librarian
He, the bludgeon, the contrarian
Come on dean, you’re taking the piss!

He had one good trick, his blood and gore
With his nervy wives and his cruel menagerie
You viewed your companion for eternity
As a curmudgeon – the pub bore

You had little time for the old sod
Now frowned over by feminists
Who think you were both misogynists
You must share a cold stone bed

With the laureate, your enemy
In the draughty antechamber of God
Two lonely old men, Phil and Ted
Locked together in perpetuity


Gunslingers


Fresh from welding cars these old-school hipsters
Wander quietly into the bar
These characters are small-town heroes
 

Their vices are hidden, like old tattoos
Slow to anger, they seek no favours
They are virtuous desperados

They chew the air, these low-slung lone-stars
There are scars on their battered Fenders
They could kill you with one cold stare
 

They can nail a riff at a hundred yards
In any fly-blown, one-horse town
They can lift the mood of the hardest crowd

Narrow-eyed, they check out the room
Casually, for opportunities
Cool customers. Quicker men are dead
 

Those who were too keen to impress
Who did not have the economy
Of true heroes: their legendary finesse

These men have stolen many hearts
With the tunes in their fingers

With their deaths heads and silver dollars
 

They’ll ride in, clean up and ride out
Leaving, merely, the air ringing
A twist of smoke. No forwarding address

Today


Today, I have been mostly going crazy
I observed, curiously, a jigsaw of clouds
And reached for their corollary in mere words – poetry

I watched paper darts cross the window hopefully
Longing for somewhere hopelessly
As if I could spear them with my melancholy

The day was night and night was day
I did not wear the mask of comedy or tragedy
Because I was mostly going crazy

Something odd stirred in the fig tree
I saw the devil’s face, a divinity
No opiate would sedate me

The sun came. But here’s the thing
Its black rays of some unknown frequency
Had no warmth. They merely fogged my plate

Berries stretched my nerves taut
Never asleep, I needed them to wake me
Coffee and wine, wine and coffee

Trapped in my solitary imperium
I scribbled in my book furiously
As mad as grass, you would say

I watched the clock and swung on its pendulum
Not wishing to dwell on the gloomy
Could it be that the world is mad, not me?