for Ford Maddox Ford
Febrile
Panting through those walrus lips and damaged lungs
That hid the teeth of a startled rabbit
He is almost a comic creation
The crushed aristocratic veins
Flowing with unreliable narration
His shape reforming before our eyes
Stained and sagacious.
He lived to write
His prodigious appetite prolific beyond repair.
Overcoming those Jamesian declensions
Vague but not weak
Old clarity of thought
Was addictive in his melancholic thrust and magnanimity.
As uncle to the gifted young
His generosity was often consumed
Then tempered as bitter aftertaste
When creativity was a dangerous game.
Hemmingway failed to understand
How women could adore him
And yet if one looks at the eyes
Drooped and veiled in beauty
And those long delicate hands
With their well shod nails
The aura invokes a sculptural tenderness
That rests naturally within the pink lemonade of his skin.
He knew how to garden
How to cultivate a palette of blooms.
“Longish, leanish, fairish”
Cadential
His distraught blue eyes peer out across the firmament.
Joyce believed his friend had already tasted heaven.
That drawling manner surely reckoned
On his broken heart.
The excess
Those satiations
Only part-song for his languid tenor voice
“Homeless here on earth”.
Sotto voce
Talking under that damaged breath
Your delusion and desire
Were uncluttered with anything malign.
You were always in that perfect moment
Seeking the inexorable push
Of those just words
Apt within the linked impression
Each phrase might beget
Technique as a freeing power.
With Conrad you deconstructed the novel’s world
Chafing against each other impossible deeds
But enamoured in life long habit
With the craft of language
Its vivid flow
And how it summons human frailty.
Lawrence foresaw your ‘dove grey’ kindness
And maybe the maudlin old soldier
Melancholy from regret, misbuttoned
Whose soft tears fall on his tattered remains.
Yet the vibrancy of all those words
Never quite lost their currency.
Impossibly fecund, the jewels were often buried.
Here was an old man
Dishevelled within his large pyjama strings frame
Who loved always on the peril of desire
The soft strength of his generosity
All consuming:
Surging through his life
With betrayal and the canker of ingratitude.
The wellsprings were certainly fecund
The young folk by the lime tree
Were roused by your belief and pleasures
No comet fused so long
Across so many lives.
It is written
Impoverished painters and poets
Still lunched for free
Within the tides of poverty
On your words and influence, soft and waning.
That high seriousness was too unsettling for the English
The swank and bragging too jocular for the Americans
Le Mot Juste impossibly refining
A hard master
As the boon of experimentation
Now thrilled a small reading circle.
The debts accumulate, unacknowledged
The advances spent.
The old writer ages across several lifetimes
In boom and bust, suspended and lonely.
The giant frog was often kissed
But the fairy tale prince was never summoned
Beyond the baby face streaked like veal.
In the end, your tone was sustained – superbly.
A son of the muses, your crumpled life
Begat a deep radiance and benediction
That no prince could ever reveal:
Here in this newly modern world, of aircrafts and buses
Rare beauty rested in your ample frame
“unpaid, uncelebrated” and deeply loved.
Gar Jones: May 2017
Febrile
Panting through those walrus lips and damaged lungs
That hid the teeth of a startled rabbit
He is almost a comic creation
The crushed aristocratic veins
Flowing with unreliable narration
His shape reforming before our eyes
Stained and sagacious.
He lived to write
His prodigious appetite prolific beyond repair.
Overcoming those Jamesian declensions
Vague but not weak
Old clarity of thought
Was addictive in his melancholic thrust and magnanimity.
As uncle to the gifted young
His generosity was often consumed
Then tempered as bitter aftertaste
When creativity was a dangerous game.
Hemmingway failed to understand
How women could adore him
And yet if one looks at the eyes
Drooped and veiled in beauty
And those long delicate hands
With their well shod nails
The aura invokes a sculptural tenderness
That rests naturally within the pink lemonade of his skin.
He knew how to garden
How to cultivate a palette of blooms.
“Longish, leanish, fairish”
Cadential
His distraught blue eyes peer out across the firmament.
Joyce believed his friend had already tasted heaven.
That drawling manner surely reckoned
On his broken heart.
The excess
Those satiations
Only part-song for his languid tenor voice
“Homeless here on earth”.
Sotto voce
Talking under that damaged breath
Your delusion and desire
Were uncluttered with anything malign.
You were always in that perfect moment
Seeking the inexorable push
Of those just words
Apt within the linked impression
Each phrase might beget
Technique as a freeing power.
With Conrad you deconstructed the novel’s world
Chafing against each other impossible deeds
But enamoured in life long habit
With the craft of language
Its vivid flow
And how it summons human frailty.
Lawrence foresaw your ‘dove grey’ kindness
And maybe the maudlin old soldier
Melancholy from regret, misbuttoned
Whose soft tears fall on his tattered remains.
Yet the vibrancy of all those words
Never quite lost their currency.
Impossibly fecund, the jewels were often buried.
Here was an old man
Dishevelled within his large pyjama strings frame
Who loved always on the peril of desire
The soft strength of his generosity
All consuming:
Surging through his life
With betrayal and the canker of ingratitude.
The wellsprings were certainly fecund
The young folk by the lime tree
Were roused by your belief and pleasures
No comet fused so long
Across so many lives.
It is written
Impoverished painters and poets
Still lunched for free
Within the tides of poverty
On your words and influence, soft and waning.
That high seriousness was too unsettling for the English
The swank and bragging too jocular for the Americans
Le Mot Juste impossibly refining
A hard master
As the boon of experimentation
Now thrilled a small reading circle.
The debts accumulate, unacknowledged
The advances spent.
The old writer ages across several lifetimes
In boom and bust, suspended and lonely.
The giant frog was often kissed
But the fairy tale prince was never summoned
Beyond the baby face streaked like veal.
In the end, your tone was sustained – superbly.
A son of the muses, your crumpled life
Begat a deep radiance and benediction
That no prince could ever reveal:
Here in this newly modern world, of aircrafts and buses
Rare beauty rested in your ample frame
“unpaid, uncelebrated” and deeply loved.
Gar Jones: May 2017
