Pay All Your Money to David Bircumshaw
The Word Bank, Athens.
It’s
like being homeless and blaming the weather.
Living
in a simile. On a colonnaded bank’s sweep
*
It
was Sunday and in GD’s professional absence
I
was wearing Matthew Arnold’s face, raging
against
the hard, the philistine times, when my
mirror
refused to open, citing my poor credit
plus
the results of its latest scan. Bad feet, wrong
eyes.
My sideboards began to itch, like furniture.
It
had been a hard weekend caught in this skin:
poets
had climbed all over me, working like nets,
on
somebody else’s invited steps, the Reading.
(Tears,
head-storms, telephone calls, applause:
the
usual coded diary of detritus, lived events.)
I knew a word that worked with bard so then
my
false beard grew grey and Berryman; GD
was
sounding suicidal and on the Parthenon
the
bloody hopes of art blurred with the step
shot
in Odessa. The Black Sea was gargling
like
water in a lift as in a last impersonation
I
fell to sketched translations, like a box orator
shouting
out of Mandelstam at enmities of air.
*
The
old banks dressed like temples, and marble
fonts;
nd drppd lttrs clmns n homeless heads
L*K* TH*S
