Stephen Romer Poems

A copy of Portrait by her unmade bed . . .
Embracing in their common hatred

what am I, against the gut alliance
of Catholic Ireland and Catholic France?

But Dedalus, I know you through and through!
We even share a name. Reading you

I sprouted wings and fled. We are both
at an angle to England, travelling south.

Will you, this once, speak for two of us,
direct her simple wilful heart, release

those channels to remorse, possess her mind,
as I come flying humbly on behind?

I doubt you would enter in so far.
What were your ardent ways but a posture

for being in despair. You had the knack
of detaching what you needed from the ache

of merely needing . . . Her brief, stifled yawn
has frazzled my patchwork wings to the bone.

. . . I glimpsed you as I fell, you venerable
heartless survivor, flying out of trouble.
...

Vuillard's studio, Château des Clayes . . .
The corner is hard to judge
where the paintings in the painting are pinned
on the yellow wall (the mise en abyme
will be the end of me)

in this gleaming Institute of Donors,
this imperial temple
raised from the muck and blood
of the stockyards, out of hog-squeal
and cost-efficient slaughter

at the end of the Millennium Park
where the towers crowd and crane
in an ogre's silver egg,
the concentration of capital
in a cunning device.

I stare with nostalgia, with homesickness
into Vuillard's yellow studio
and I know the place
absolutely, it is that humane
heaven of drapes and turpentine

where I shall at last lie down
on the lumpy mattress
with the stripy bedspread
below the little skylight —
my sweet, autarchic rest.
...

Abruptly a wing may open
and come beating
out of the cloudbank

and then a whole
freewheeling company
as if the cloud had stored them

in a long embalming
of ashlight and cumulus:
strangely disinterred

they swoop upriver
in a sequence
of achieved articulations.
...