Tuesday 2 December 2014

Proposal

In the piazza Navona we sit and drink the past
we are bees at the flower, the fountain the acquifer
anyway whatever,
there's passable pizza, acqua vitae espresso
courage for the cluster of gems in
my pocket

And bees again buzzing  Barberini
patrons, villains, builders and killers, 
in the blood soaked robes of Rome

And laughing again at some joke you've made 
seeing reflected in your sunglasses
the face of your nearly husband scanning the square
for a place without pilgrims 
somewhere to add our history to all this layered meaning,
we're another generation with the unyielding idea of God.

When a Pope dies they melt his ring and leave a vacant throne until white Sistine smoke announces the next of Peter's line. Power and faith holding the masses at bay with love. Fuck knows what they do when one resigns.

I can just make out your eyes under the sunglasses face to the sun that way women do
soaking glamour and cell deep sustenance.

It's March I brought you here to warm you.

Yes your eyes then,
they've got that wide alertness you show when
the cells of you let go their prisoners and anything can happen,
but somehow you don't suspect this even though your Dad knows 
and I'll need a quieter place to do it; 
the only quiet place here when there's a new Pope on the go.

Really I planned this but didn't count on the daisies even 
and the real still heart of this place 
where poor miserable Keats declared to admiring eternity
his name was writ in water.

I'll write my name on you here.

You, still unaware though skipping through the daisies 
and finding Shelley you rest your head a while on my shoulder 
and seem to sigh.

Those Romantics liked a sigh 
and I would make a point of it 
half celebrate and undermine it, 
and we'd have what comics call 
a good 5 minutes of material from it

But this is serious earth now 
Romantics beat the comics. 

Over the wall busy Catholics leave me to my not quite secular promise.

Here lies one whose name was writ in water

The water of me not nervous, not stormy, 
not all waves like the death of Shelley 
more a steady break of wave upon wave 
at the sure shore.

This is roughly how I planned it, the failsafe place of poets. 

So Grecian Urn then mainly from memory and also my iPhone 
while you so happy in this glade 
and taking pictures of the light 
opening those cells that lock you up in winter 
so light-glad I can hear them I think 
crack open with your laughter

Fiddling with the camera you don't notice I'm on my knee

But listening to the ending of you as girlfriend 

beauty is truth

you know that don't you, 
your beauty often stops me in my tracks 
sending thoughts off track 
or one track in particular

you have just noticed me
on my knee 
saying "will you marry me?"

When you fire a gun without ear protection
The silence after the bang is surprising.


Your loud dancing YES loud enough 
to wake Keats light bounces off emerald grass 
white diamond daisies 
light through leaves 
and the latest waking bees 
do a dance with us through poet nourished trees 
in the old gold 
Roman sun.











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