Provincials

for Stuart Henson

So Petrarch lived here? First saw Laura here, invented the sonnet and began a craze that turned to ‘tyranny’ (your word). These days they’re hardly de rigueur, but there’s the fear that if you can’t balance seven hundred years on fourteen lines and five rhymes, then the Muse will leave for Tony Harrison. There she goes. But you and I have learned by now to steer a steady course up Petrarch’s mountain track or — better metaphor — across the Rhône beside that Pont that keeps on reaching for a rhyme on its far bank. We know the knack of picking a wind, too: not one that’s blown infernos; one that gently tries the door.

Avignon, 2012