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Home>>Poetry>>Poetry Collections>>Fan Mail>>To Prue Shaw

To Prue Shaw: a letter from Cambridge

Picture
I miss you. As I settle down to write,
Creating for my forearm room to rest,
I see the hard grey winter evening light

Is scribbled on with lipstick in the west
As just another drowsy Cambridge day
Discreetly shines and shyly looks its best

Before, with eyeballs glazed, it slides away
And slips into a night’s sleep deeper still,
Where Morpheus holds undisputed sway

Throughout the weary academic mill –
An atmosphere of cosy somnolence
I hope that I can summon up the will

To counteract. I’m striving to condense
Within the terza rima my ideas
Concerning us, the arts and world events.

I shake my skull, which for the moment clears,
And shape a line to say that minus you
I’m lonelier than Hell and bored to tears:

Then slumber paints my eyelids thick with glue.
Uncertainty bemuses. Somewhere round
Lake Garda you’ve got lost and left no clue.

The post is void of cards, the phone of sound.
If you were elsewhere than in Italy
I’d start a hue and cry to get you found,
​But as things are I think it best to be
More circumspect. The blower’s on the blink
Across the strike-bound north from sea to sea,
And Heaven only knows the waste of ink
Involved in trusting letters to the mail.
The ship of state is getting set to sink

Again. (The poor thing never learned to sail.)
Italia! Poverina! Yes, and yet
The place’s old enchantments never fail

To work their subtle wiles. You’ll not forget,
I’m sure, when passing ice-cold Sirmione,
The way we used to swim and not get wet

In water soft and warm as zabaglione.
The titles to the olive groves and palaces
Catullus walked with courtesan and crony

In our time were Onassis’s and Callas’s,
But as you stood hip-deep in liquid air
I thought the moment sweet past all analysis

And thanked the pagan gods I knew were there
(The sunset stretched a ladder of gold chains
Across the lake) that they’d been so unfair

In handing you the beauty and the brains.
An egocentric monster then as now
I graciously resolved to keep my gains

By staying near you, never thinking how
You might not co-divide that deep esteem.
Unwarrantedly dry of palm and brow

I wed you, in due course. Today I dream
Of what I would, if I had missed the boat
Undoubtedly have undergone. A scream

Of retroactive anguish rends my throat.
That physicist from Stockholm you refused,
The one who tried to buy you a fur coat:

To think of the affection I abused!
Now here was this attractive, well-heeled bloke,
Whose talk of synchrotrons kept you amused,
Whose china-white Mercedes – Holy smoke!
What made me certain he should get the grief
And I the joy? I swear I almost croak

From apprehension mingled with relief
Recalling how I flirted with defeat.
It’s only now I think myself a thief –

Of his luck and your time. You were to meet
Yet brighter prospects later. I still won.
I had a system nobody could beat.
​
I flailed about and called my folly fun
For years and even then was not too late:
The threads that joined us were as strongly spun
As your forgiveness of me was great.
I wonder that your heart has not grown numb,
So long you’ve had (or felt you’ve had) to wait
For my unthinking fondness to become
A love for you like yours for me. The fault
Is all mine if it has, for being dumb.

I’d have no comeback under Heaven’s vault
- my only plea could be è colpa mia,
A hanging head, and tears that tasted salt –
If you should fade from my life like la Pia.
But you have not, so I shall for the nonce
Eschew this droning form of longorrhoea

Which feeds upon what might have happened once
And hasten to give thanks that you and I,
Like Verdi and Strepponi or the Lunts,

Seem apt, so far at least, to give the lie
To notions that all order falls apart –
Though giving them as one who would defy

The gods, yet feels a flutter in his heart.
Has something happened? Down there, so much can.
The right-wing terrorists are acting smart.
They’ve thought hard and have come up with a plan:
To bomb the innocent. Earmarked for death
Are woman, daughter, child and unarmed man.

From now on no one draws an easy breath.
Your train ride down to Florence will be like
Accepting a night’s lodging from Macbeth.

I wonder if you’d rather hire a bike?
Except the roads aren’t safe. Well, why not walk?
You’d thrive on a four-hundred-mile hike . . .
But no, all this is fearful husband’s talk:
What-might-be acting like what-might-have-been
To turn my knees to jelly, cheeks to chalk.
No matter how infernal the machine
Prepared to blow our sheltered lives to bits,
It would be less than just, indeed obscene,

To harbour the suspicion murder fits
The Italian national character. Not so.
As always, most of them live by their wits

Amidst – as, to your cost, you’ve come to know –
Administrative chaos. It’s a wonder
That utter barbarism’s been so slow

In gaining ground from brouhaha and blunder,
Yet even when Fascismo had its hour
The blood was always upstaged by the thunder.

They held pyjama parties with their power
Forgetting to wipe out a single race.
Some blockhead said a bomb was like a flower,

Some communists got booted in the face,
But no one calls that lapse a Holocaust –
More like a farce that ended in disgrace,

When men yelled like a racing car’s exhaust
In uniforms adorned with a toy dagger;
A time when word and meaning were divorced,

Divided by a verbal strut and swagger
As pompous as a moose’s mating call,
Bombastic as a war dance by Mick Jagger.

But we both know it’s not like that at all,
The eternal Italy, the one that matters.
The blue-chinned heavies at the costume ball

Whose togs inept explosions blow to tatters
Are just the international tribe of jerks
That crop up anywhere, as mad as hatters,

To pistol-whip the poor and cop the perks.
The real Italians, far from on the make,
Are makers. Ye shall know them by their works –
To which the guide who brought me wide awake
Was you, ten years ago. You were my tutor.
At times you must have thought this a mistake

And wished me elsewhere, or at least astuter.
I paced our tiny rented room in Rome,
I crackled like an overtaxed computer

And used my nerve-wracked fingers for a comb,
Attempting to construe Inferno Five.
It took so long I wanted to go home

But comprehension started to arrive
At last. I saw the lovers ride the storm
And felt the pulse which brought the dead alive.
For sheer intensity of lyric form
I’d never read that stretch of verse’s peer.
You said such things, with Dante, were the norm.
You proved it, as we read on for a year.
And so it was our Galahad, that book,
As well as one ordained to make it clear

How art and intellect are king and rook
And not just man and wife and guest and host –
They link together like an eye and hook
While each moves through the other like a ghost.
Both interpenetrate inside the mind
And, in creation, nothing matters most –

By Dante these great facts are underlined,
Made incandescent like a sunlit rose.
My clenched fist thumped my forehead. I’d been blind!
Awaking from a Rip Van Winkle doze
I realized I’d been groping in the gloom,
Not even good at following my nose.

A knowing bride had schooled a clumsy groom:
Belated, crude, but strong, his urge to learn
Began there, in that shoebox of a room –

A classic eager dimwit doomed to burn
The candle at both ends while, head in hands,
He mouths what he can only just discern

And paragraphs twice read half understands.
To Petrarch’s verses and to Croce’s thought
We moved on later. Etiquette demands

I didn’t go on about the books we bought
In all those second-hand shops we infested.
I’ve never mastered grammar as I ought.

My scraps of erudition aren’t digested.
But still I’ve grown, drawn out by what I’ve read,
More cosmopolitan – well, less sequestered.
(Our old friend Goethe, writing in his head,
Would tap out stresses on his girlfriend’s spine.
Gorblimey, talk about Technique in Bed!
Urbanity on that scale’s not my line.
I must admit, however, that at times

I found my brain, as well as fogged with wine,
Inopportunely chattering with rhymes.)
And then there were the canvases and frescoes,
Cascading like a visual change of chimes
Or stacked ten-deep like racks of tins in Tesco’s
All over Rome and Naples, Florence, Venice . . .
I felt like a research group of UNESCO’s
Investigating some microbic menace:
To sort it out, life wasn’t long enough.
It just went on like Rosewall playing tennis.

There wasn’t any end to all that stuff.
An early Raphael, or late Perugino?
(I haven’t got a clue. I’ll have to bluff.)

Who sculpted this, Verrocchio or Mino?
(But who the heck was Mino?) No doubt what
The banquet would have soon become (a beano

With sickness as the sequel) had you not
Been there to function as my dietitian;
Ensuring I’d not try to scoff the lot

But merely taste each phase at its fruition,
Assimilating gradually, and thus
Catch up with Europe’s civilized tradition –

Which wasn’t really a departing bus,
You argued, but a spirit all around me
I’d get attuned to if I didn’t fuss.

From that time forward every summer found me
In Florence, where you studied all year long.
You diligence continued to astound me.

I went on getting attributions wrong,
But bit by bit I gained perceptiveness
As day by day I keenly helped to throng

The galleries, exalted – nothing less –
By how those fancy lads all worked like slaves
To make their age so howling a success
Before they rolled, fulfilled, into their graves.
In Cambridge, night wears on. The evening ending
Will soon dictate the sleep my system craves.
I’ll close. These lines might just be worth the sending
To Florence, care of Rita at her flat.
Supposing they get through, they’ll wait there, pending
Your safe arrival – and amen to that.
That city is a place where we were poor.
In furnished dungeons blacker than your hat

We slept, or failed to, on the concrete floor
And met the morning’s heat chilled to the bone –
Yet each day we felt better than before
Forgetting what it meant to be alone.
Well, this is what it means: distracting games
With tricky rhyme schemes and  - wait, there’s the phone.
‘Will you accept a call from Mrs James?’
P.S. You’ve made this letter obsolete
But rather than consign it to the flames

I’ll send it. For you must admit, my sweet,
A triple-rhyming verse communication,
While scarcely ranking as an epic feat,
​
Deserves perusal by its inspiration.

Copyright © 2019
​Built & managed  By Dawn Mancer
  • Home
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      • Fantasy in the West Wing
      • Pushkin's Deadly Gift
      • Great Sopranos of Our Time
      • A Memory Called Malouf
      • Bing Crosby's Hidden Art
      • Larkin Treads the Boards
      • The Iron Capital of Bruno Schulz
      • Criticism a la Frank Kermode
      • Fast Talking Dames
      • Rough Guides to Shakespeare
      • General Election Sequence 2001
      • Primo Levi and the Painted Veil
      • A Big Boutique of Australian Essays
      • Cyrano on the Scaffold
      • A Nightclub in Bali
      • Aldous Huxley Then and Now
      • A Man Called Peter Porter
      • Philip Roth's Alternative America
      • The Miraculous Vineyard of Australian Poetry
      • Save Us From Celebrity
    • The Revolt of the Pendulum >
      • The Question of Karl Kraus
      • John Bayley's Daily Bread
      • Kingsley and the Women
      • Canetti Man of Mystery
      • Camille Paglia Burns for Poetry
      • The Guidebook Detectives
      • Zuckerman Uncorked
      • The Flight from the Destroyer
      • Saying Famous Things
      • Insult to the Language
      • The Perfectly Bad Sentence
      • Happiness Writes White
      • All Stalkers Kill
      • Best Eaten Cold
      • White Shorts of Leni Reifenstahl
      • Made in Britain, More or Less
      • Movie Criticism in America
      • Show Me the Horror
      • The Measure of A.D. Hope
      • Robert Hughes Remembers
      • Modern Australian Painting
      • On Diamond Jim McClelland
      • The Voice of John Anderson
      • Niki Lauda Wins Going Slowly
      • Damon Hill's Bravest Day
      • Jonathan James-Moore
      • Ian Adam
      • Pat Kavanagh
      • Starting with Sludge
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        • Japanese Maple
        • Sentenced to Life
        • Procedure for Disposal
        • Leçons des ténèbres
        • Driftwood Houses
        • Event Horizon
        • Neuland
        • Echo Point
        • Change of Domicile
        • Holding Court
        • Too Much Light
        • Nature Programme
        • My Latest Fever
        • Nina Kogan's Geometrical Heaven
        • The Emperor's Last Words
        • Winter Plums
      • Nefertiti in the Flak Tower >
        • Whitman and the Moth
        • The Falcon Growing Old
      • Angels over Elsinore
      • The Book of My Enemy >
        • Recent Verse
        • Verse Letters
      • Opal Sunset
      • Other Passports >
        • Recent Verse >
          • The Book of My Enemy has been Remaindered
        • Parodies etc.
        • Earlier Verse
        • Verse Diaries
      • Fan Mail >
        • To Russell Davies: a letter from Cardiff
        • To Martin Amis: a letter from Indianapolis
        • To Pete Atkin: a letter from Paris
        • To Prue Shaw: a letter from Cambridge
        • To Tom Stoppard: a letter from London
        • To Peter Porter: a letter to Sydney
    • Epic Poems >
      • The River in the Sky
      • Gate of Lilacs
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        • Heaven - Cantos 1-3
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      • Somewhere Becoming Rain
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        • The Donaghy Negotiation
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      • Les Murray
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      • Christian Wiman
      • Olivia Cole
      • Judith Beveridge
      • Peter Goldsworthy
      • Kapka Kassabova
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    • My life in lyrics
    • Selected Song Lyrics >
      • Dancing Master
      • Faded Mansion
      • Have You got a Biro I can Borrow?
      • I Have to Learn to Live Alone Again
      • Hill of Little Shoes
      • History & Geography
      • I See the Joker
      • Laughing Boy
      • My Brother's Keeper
      • National Steel
      • Nothing Left to Say
      • Sessionman's Blues
      • Song for Rita
      • Stranger in Town
      • Sunlight Gate
      • The Egoist
      • The Eye of the Universe
      • The Ice Cream Man
      • Femme Fatale
      • The Master of the Revels
      • Thirty-year Man
      • Winter Spring
  • Video
    • Talking in the Library >
      • Series One
      • Series Two
      • Series Three
      • Series Four
      • Series Five
    • Postcards
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