Monday, December 12, 2016

Robert Sheppard: Poem With You for Patricia Farrell




A Poem With You

Soft thighs open the spring day to sunlight,
sexual thrill in the quality of morning,
the frisson of travel: the Amphitheatre glimpsed
from the Wall, the Deva, the shell of the Civil War hall,

its sky-blue oval windows. We stand on charity,
buying clothes and CDs, catching up on popular music
45 years late. We dine at a restaurant conspicuously French
but covertly Slavic with caraway seeds thrown onto trout.

Workaday grievances rise in the holiday talk
like granite, come and go unscheduled as
women’s legs under tables, seducing no one.

Reading mixed metaphors on the train home,
I’m wary of them. Part of me is still in bed,
as it should be, in such a poem, with you.

(for Patricia)


Robert

This is from the sequence 'It's Nothing'. Another poem, the last, called 'Last Look', from that sequence may be read here.