Hotel Récamier
Place St Sulpice
a dream ago
when Scorpia held a hand-gun
to your head
and asked
would you die for love.
You called it a loaded question.
You were afraid
not so much of a bullet
as of a woman
like the throw of a dice
that could bring you luck
or disaster.
It might have been a scene
from an old movie –
real people pretending
to be real –
or just one poet’s
idle imagining.
‘Tread carefully
for you tread on my dreams.’
He saw them as leaves
filling the window in summer
in autumn
as golden
abundant showers.
I saw them as the glass
(a shadow of itself)
through which the leaves
appeared.
This was the dream –
the moon a big
complete
circle
yellow as
no not butter
except there was one
small
perfect
triangle
clipped out of it
through which could be seen
the darkness of forever.
Not a ball then
not at all
but as we’d known it
in childhood
a flat disk
a coin of gold paper
local
ours
in our own sky
and rising
over the Bay.
Fellini’s La Dolce Vita
Marcello in the wind
sees her across the inlet
calling something.
‘Non capisco’ he mouths
and she smiles
her angel smile
pointing to her brows.
Is she telling him
he has horns?
that he’s becoming
a devil?
Across the agitation of waters
his eyes
‘Non capisco’ –
he says it again
shrugs
waves
and turns away to where
his wild friends
from the all-night riot
are drifting back to the woods.
Dead on the sand
God outstares the light
with a blind
glaucous eye.
It doesn’t matter –
nor should Marcello grieve
that innocence once lost
is gone for ever.
She has shown him
that beauty is particular
unqualified
absolute
eternal –
that it is real.
He dreamed he was the world’s
best-dressed Bedouin
with girls for guards –
or the Wizard of Ozymandius
in a Disneyland desert
crying
‘Look on my works ye Mighty
and despair!’