Self Portrait

Self Portrait

A man stands before an undergraduate class,
talking about Lear and the chain of being.
Two rows back a blonde girl sits, exquisite,
her hair a cloud of light in the darkened hall:
he forgets who Edmund is, realising that,
even before his grey hair and his wrinkles
she would never have granted him a smile.

A man sits alone on a hill overlooking a bay:
he is on the verandah of a big house.
The autumn sun slides over trimarans,
ocean-going ketches, mock Tuscan villas;
he reflects that he would trade it all, willingly,
to taste the mouth of a blue-eyed girl
in willow-shade by a dark lagoon.

A man drinks his fifth rum of the afternoon
wondering why his guilts are crystalline novas,
but his petty triumphs are half-remembered,
dim and vague as the Magellanic clouds.
In the house behind him his wife and children
come and go and do not speak. In the gathering dusk
he watches the haemorrhaging sky:

And only his two Staffordshires stay with him,
his two red stocky smiling dogs who love Him,
thinking He is, if not the One God, at least divine,
for He can open cans with His clever paws.
They are charitable about His guilts, His failures;
they forgive Him His pitiful inadequacies;
loving Him so long as He brings them food
and scratches, not too roughly, behind their ears.