Tony Beyer


The worst in me

for Salvatore Quasimodo


4 a m     still in bed     the day’s poem
already tapped out on the laptop

your lines I adored in adolescence
seem adolescent to me now

the kind of bombast
that goes with a first moustache

and yet there were earthquakes
volcanoes and hurtling rocks behind it

the whole energy of the green earth
brought to bear in a small volume



Lamp shadow


tired but unable to sleep at night
I read a long article on the internet

about the homosexuality of E M Forster
a subject that only very peripherally

interests me and one unlikely at this
late stage to furnish any surprises

yet it is possible to imagine
worse fodder for the tired brain

incarcerated for example with nothing
other on hand than Donald J Trump’s

masterpiece and thus faced with
the dire option not to read at all

at least poor old Morgan stifled as he was
knew he was alive and cared that others were

a small but critically irreducible beacon
while the lights keep going out
*

which brings me to those poets
I came to love in middle age

who’ve stayed with me greater or
lesser each in his own way

flawed at times both in personality
and in performance on the page

Housman’s uncanny mechanics 
astringent as a sponge dipped in vinegar 

Robert Graves all over the place
all his life dodging sniper fire

and Auden so publicly secretive
his nightly martini gave nothing away
*

finally the mysterious
Edwin Arlington Robinson

who wrote into the American vacuum
between the Civil War and the Crash

a man of impeccable turnout and manners
languidly in his portrait nursing a cigar

the cold world kept at bay with rue like Housman’s
a poem instead of a bullet through his head



Literacy


1

there’s a moment in one of Turgenev’s sketches
among my favourites in all literature

when the duck hunters swamp their punt
and have to wade towards shore neck deep

holding their fowling pieces above their heads
with both hands to keep them dry

and the old serf guide and boatman
who has done everything he can to ingratiate himself

and gain the patronage of these members of the gentry
trudges staunchly beside them 

holding above his head in the same manner
the pole he had used to propel them over the marsh


2

my son and I read J-K Huysmans’ The Damned
and agreed we both much preferred

the ingredients and details of the meals shared
with the bell ringer and his wife in the cathedral tower

to all that onerous rot about the mad medieval
molester and murderer Gilles de Rais who was incidentally

an associate of Joan of Arc as was the Bastard of Orleans
whose part my classmates and I delighted

in nominating each other to read aloud
while studying Shaw’s play in sixth form English


3

I used to advise my more eager
high school students

to postpone reading On the Road
A Clockwork Orange and probably William S 

Burroughs until the first year at university
when sober evaluation of their quality

would become less significant
than their role in cultural development



Floral tribute



nineteenth century style arrangements
of hydrangeas around the house 

in vases and jugs on sideboards (them-
selves a nineteenth century convention)

reprise Henri Fantin-Latour
the unimpeachable master

of this sort of thing who painted
forty a year for twenty years

without diminution of quality
though driven by commercial necessity

sparing us at the same time
allegories he might have preferred

but not the great group portraits
including one known as

Corner of the Table with the
wild-haired boy second from the left

the boy from the Green Cabaret
the boy with the tobacco-stained heart

chin on hand     eyes
two bullet holes through sheet steel

already pissed off with his bald
boyfriend beside him who’s just pissed



Colourful guy


because he wanted to help men
feel easier about themselves
Robert was obliged to wear
polychrome weskits and cravats
on all public occasions whether
filmed for later broadcast or live

among the things he forgot
later in life was the damage
this sort of costuming could do
to his message and his following
neither of which lent itself
inherently to the flamboyant

an American thing his offshore
detractors might assume
not unlike Elvis’s sideburns
Liberace’s wardrobe or the elongated 
neckties and ochre face paint
of the recently dethroned POTUS

for your signal to be heard
on that jammed transcontinental
frequency you have to stand out
drums feathers flowing white locks
plucked or strummed strings
when poems aren’t quite enough




Tony Beyer writes in Taranaki, New Zealand.
 
 

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