The gardens are in bloom your mother loved.
A jazz trumpet blares – ‘Stormy Weather’ –
to a girl spread with her laptop on the grass.
Delinquent for a day, you came
to catch the last of summer on these paths
or the bank grown perilous with out-of-control,
knotted weeds, where your father fished
at weekends, where, midweek, only tourists stroll
and the river-god, Old Father Thames,
cuckoo-spit shining in his beard,
is unfazed by the pleasure-boat’s farting horn.
How they clung here by their fingertips
to respectability, slipping each year
a little further down a terrible, almost-sheer
drop into bottomless debt. You, meanwhile,
rose beyond the world of ‘bread’,
heedless of where yours came from; chose
another music, being free to choose.
At Richmond the river is running for the city;
Though the tall houses on the hill and hotels
In white paint hint of the cliffs and broader sea,
He cannot falter nor alter from his nature…
Lines you took to, and took to heart, at fifteen,
your poetic years, when you haunted
the bookshop run by a red-faced,
purse-lipped, cantankerous old queen
who taunted you with how you probably hadn’t read
‘anything except – who? Ted Hughes?’
That stung with its wrongness. A year or so on,
it was the folk-club in the church crypt – another
well-brought-up sensitive with cavalier hair
and songs of consequence-free love
on mattresses in flea-market-furnished attics.
You had your share of that, more than your share.
The bookshop flogs ‘interior design’,
the old boy’s long dead, like your mother
and father, and the sky’s gone dark; gulls drift above
the river, driven by a storm. That’s still here,
at least – the pub in which you watched
the ‘legendary’ Peter Green sip a beer –
he was alone, but you were too shy to speak…
Too late now, much too late.
And suddenly you recall her next line:
Lord, neither let falsity my days dissipate.
