Our magazine was merely an overture
To the night and the party. I had predicted
Disastrous expense: a planetary
Certainty, according to Prospero’s book.
Jupiter and the full moon conjunct
Opposed Venus. Disastrous expense
According to that book. Especially for me.
The conjunction combust my natal Sun.
Venus pinned exact on my mid-heaven.
For a wait-and-see astrologer – so what?
Touch of a bat’s wing easily exorcised.
Our Chaucer would have stayed at home with his Dante.
Locating the planets more precisely,
He would have pondered it deeper. What else? I left it
For serious astrologers to worry
That conjunction, conjunct my Sun, conjunct
With your natal ruling Mars. And Chaucer
Would have pointed to that day’s Sun in the Fish
Conjunct your Ascendant exactly
Opposite my Neptune and fixed
In my tenth House of good and evil fame.
Our Chaucer, I think, would have sighed.
He would have assured us, shaking his sorrowful head,
That day the solar system married us
Whether we knew it or not.
Falcon Yard:
Girl-friend like a loaded crossbow. The sound-waves
Jammed and torn by Joe Lyde’s Jazz. The hall
Like the tilting deck of the Titanic:
A silent film, with that blare over it. Suddenly –
Lucas engineered it – suddenly you.
First sight. First snapshot isolated
Unalterable, stilled in the camera’s glare.
Taller
Than ever you were again. Swaying so slender
It seemed your long, perfect, American legs
Simply went on up. That flaring hand,
Those long, balletic, monkey-elegant fingers.
And the face – a tight ball of joy.
I see you there, clearer, more real
Than in any of the years in its shadow –
As if I saw you that once, then never again.
The loose fall of hair – that floppy curtain
Over your face, over your scar. And your face
A rubbery ball of joy
Round the African-lipped, laughing, thickly
Crimson-painted mouth. And your eyes
Squeezed in your face, a crush of diamonds,
Incredibly bright, bright as a crush of tears
That might have been tears of joy, a squeeze of joy.
You meant to knock me out
With your vivacity. I remember
Little from the rest of that evening.
I slid away with my girl-friend. Nothing
Except her hissing rage in a doorway
And my stupefied interrogation
Of your blue headscarf from my pocket
And the swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks
That was to brand my face for the next month.
The me beneath it for good.