2013-09-01 – Poets Ride

Lines On A Young Lady's Photograph Album

At last you yielded up the album, which
Once open, sent me distracted. All your ages
Matt and glossy on the thick black pages!
Too much confectionery, too rich
I choke on such nutritious images

My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose
In pigtails, clutching a reluctant cat
Or furred yourself, a sweet girl-graduate
Or lifting a heavy-headed rose
Beneath a trellis, or in a trilby-hat

(Faintly disturbing, that, in several ways)
From every side you strike at my control
Not least through those these disquieting chaps who loll
At ease about your earlier days
Not quite your class, I'd say, dear, on the whole

But o, photography! as no art is
Faithful and disappointing! that records
Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds
And will not censor blemishes
Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards

But shows a cat as disinclined, and shades
A chin as doubled when it is, what grace
Your candour thus confers upon her face!
How overwhelmingly persuades
That this is a real girl in a real place

In every sense empirically true!
Or is it just the past? Those flowers, that gate
These misty parks and motors, lacerate
Simply by being you; you
Contract my heart by looking out of date

Yes, true; but in the end, surely, we cry
Not only at exclusion, but because
It leaves us free to cry. We know what was
Won't call on us to justify
Our grief, however hard we yowl across

The gap from eye to page. So I am left
To mourn (without a chance of consequence)
You, balanced on a bike against a fence
To wonder if you'd spot the theft
Of this one of you bathing; to condense

In short, a past that no one now can share
No matter whose your future; calm and dry
It holds you like a heaven, and you lie
Unvariably lovely there
Smaller and clearer as the years go by.