Apollo in a Bowler

Maybe he rolls 297. Maybe

He knows perfection is for men. He breaks
A branch off Daphne, drops it in a pond,
Dammed if he does. He leaves his tie askew
And burns Morocco on the morning drive.
Champagne explodes because he smiles, but she
Is rotting from the inside, laurel leaves
Losing their lustre, borne on Boreas,
One landing on his hat, as though it were
A ribbon for a boulevardier, a trophy
Won at a county fair from mortal rubes.

Doing Oxford

And if we do not know of what we speak,
that is not an impediment: the place
looks wise enough to make us wise.  All souls
turn towards knowledge like a plant to light,
so in the books which have beset this place
must be enough of all we need to know
to make us dons and fellows, odd and solemn.
We need subscribe to none of thirty-nine.
We need not trust to bachelorhood.  The names
are only metaphors: we shan't repent
of what we were, yet still be what we want.
Magdalene is the chapel, not the college.

Homage to a Master

Seventy years of exercise
in prosody and discipline.
A dollar and a quarter buys
Selected Poems, which within
are two lyrics he wrote, we know,
in baffled ignorance and delight,
more than forty years ago
and both in the same night.

A Poem Unrequited

The mice knew first, the crickets and the small

Wrens, who muted their music in respect.

The Bigguns had no reason to expect

A coming, first or second, so they all

Went to the circus, laundry, or the mall,

To buy some smoke detectors could detect.

And then they bought a family to protect.

The beetles sang, We shan't shut up till Fall.

Somewhere the news was posted.  In a paper

Of general circulation, someone read:

Death shall have no dominion, being dead;

But he was only someone, not a shaper

Of big opinion.  Big opinion heard

Interruption and said, Shut up that bird.

Regime Change

Grandmothers throw themselves into the street, 
Caterwauling, burning their ancient caches 
Of diaries and grosgrain lingerie. 
No more to hope for, now that loss has come, 
Unpacked in the great room, fixed itself a snack, 
And cut the landline. Tell the tailor no: 
Alteration belongs to yesterday. 

The authorized watchers do not want to watch. 
Where younger pain explodes, this just hangs on, 
Nor all that long. The actuarials 
Identify themselves and confiscate 
Running shoes of the stationary kind, 
The keening widows and the flattened fraus 
Not vigorous enough for knitted sleeves. 

The grandmothers grow smaller, they retreat, 
Much larger women on their wedding days. 
Their children now have dewlaps. Here come vans 
As big as percherons. The women grip 
Their sorrow and will not be dragged away. 
By morning they will be a little field 
Of husk and hull, a compost now assoiled.