postcards to a lover

Barcelona

It came from nowhere,

in a steamy Irish bar just off Las Ramblas,

your hot flash of fury.

The pint glass like lightning struck the wall
(struck his head, if he hadn't ducked)

showering us with rage and glass

and sticky fluid

black in the red room.

The split-second cessation

of that careless craic.

He up off

into the crowded

Catalan night,

and you too

by another door.

“Oh Christ” i thought, and left

 to look for my lover

and our friend.

i found you somehow

and dragged you back to our pensión

by the wrist

like a child,

remonstrating over your objections,

while you hung back

like a child.

“What on earth did he say to you?”

And you, too drunk and silly

to answer straight.

Locking you in our room i took the key

And went again into the night

to search the streets and squares

in the dark soft Spanish rain

for our shell-shocked friend.

Shaking my head

laughing quietly

loving your

temerity.

Athens

In Syntagma, in the shadow of the Parthenon,

made fearless by my foreign-ness

i stood in a pharmacy

asking haltingly

and somewhat too loudly

for something with which

to treat your candida

while the aged patrons

lined against the wall,

variously nodded, winked, cackled, slept,

scowled, and chewed their gums,

hearing my carefully prepared speech

clatter piece by piece

into the chemist’s

cool ceramic mortar.

Whereupon he pestled it

into a powder,

and made a paste

using the spittle of those ancients,

while speaking in what seemed

almost oracular fashion (i could not understand).

He invoked the great god Ciba-Geigy,

and produced an unguent

to our universal acclaim.

i crossed his palm with silver

took my lover’s gift

and left.

Naxos

In our sight twin pillars,

the remains of Diana’s temple.

Astride a blubbing scooter,

the small roundness of our pregnancy

gently nudging at my back,

in the louvred shade of squid drying

like so much dirty laundry,

amid the nagging gulls,

we had

although we did not know

our last hurrah.

Of all possible treasures of that time

what blind prescience made us

choose to souvenir from our studio

a homely, hand-carved, battered

wooden spoon?

Florence

We did not ascend

to the ballooning crown

of Il Duomo,

sandbagged as we were

by the Child, the stroller,

the bags and bottles and blankets.

Moored in the square

with the poster sellers,

exhausted by our argument

at the station that morning,

we could barely rise

to the level

of civilised dispute.

“I’ll wait here with her.  You go.”

“No, you go.”

“no, you.”

Neither of us was prepared

to leave the other.

That would come later.

Earthbound then,

we left

in search of refreshment,

the Child between us.

…and home again (a sonnet)

Two years

more or less

since you threw me out.

My bewilderment a small and heavy sphere now,

rubbed smooth by constant worrying and turning over

the nubs and spikes of anger worn away, mostly.

Compressed by countless heartpump squeezes

The bluster driven out like

air from dough

knocked back.

Dense and

massy as a dark star.

“I’ve got bigger balls than you have”, you’d said.

Maybe, but mine are harder.






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