The Third Man Poem by John Dixon

Maybe all stories are a screen
through which a moral shines,
maybe our pangs of guilt demean
whatever love refines,
maybe my father knew Graham Greene
and speaks between his lines.

True: he was schooled with Graham.
But spoke only of the boy's humiliation—
of Mrs Greene at the school gate
with forgotten pants and braces.

His tales sift with the years
into my archaeology of sonship
along with his flute and wooden boot trees.
I could have left it all to lie
like a locked collection in a cedar cabinet
faintly redolent of camphor and biography.

But I'm in Harry Lime's Vienna,
where the night wind smells of sewers,
belief, betrayal, doubt and cordite.

And at the fatal shot my father wakes
and glances down on weaker men, on Greene,
on faith torn by desire's salt tides,
on half-lit streets where hope and fear
smile from a doorway through the same white face,
on muddling of realities
like the content of a grave.

He looks in the very grave
where Greene has brought us,
and the zither's heartbeat pleads with ours
for something to come back from it
unreal enough for us to love.