Stephen Romer
LA FERRONIERE
There she stands, in profile, as she always was,
eyes alive mouth set, hair swept into a chestnut nest
I could have lived in, her solid arms and hands
efficient as if for butchery or wielding the pen.
There she stands, immortal now, my sentimental education!
Red syrup of Campari, black olive, black Tiber, a stream
of flesh and fire, blood coursing in a light rain.
An oval face, the complete equivocal
Leonardine smile and tilt of the head and neck
and the short ravaging laugh, the eyes curious
at my excess, and how she kept them open
to spy upon our riverine midnight kiss.
I collapsed against the foot of Constantine
a young man broken into warring fragments
caught between the pagan and the airborne angels
in a ménage à trois of his own imagining,
a listening at doors, confession half-heard,
on the Quirinale – an ugly doge – who fed her morsels
in return for which… Her laughing confidences
felled me like an axe… But then that night
me felice! by the shores of Tiber.
She half had pity on my peynes smerte
and O so lightly stepping from a doorway
where I gazed, strode eagerly on, to a life
undisclosed until today, where now she stands
the darling of the glossy supplement,
a part of everybody’s curiosity.
I look in vain for traces of the shattered youth
– white body stranded on the stygian bank –
in her sulphurous, broken-hearted pages.
I scarcely understood the merest portion,
and the little I got to taste, was bitter.
What of that? A magnet under iron filings
my lady of the rose pattern in the dust
emerges now, in bas-relief,
the language with the image dancing on.
There she stands, in profile, as she always was,
eyes alive mouth set, hair swept into a chestnut nest
I could have lived in, her solid arms and hands
efficient as if for butchery or wielding the pen.
There she stands, immortal now, my sentimental education!
Red syrup of Campari, black olive, black Tiber, a stream
of flesh and fire, blood coursing in a light rain.
An oval face, the complete equivocal
Leonardine smile and tilt of the head and neck
and the short ravaging laugh, the eyes curious
at my excess, and how she kept them open
to spy upon our riverine midnight kiss.
I collapsed against the foot of Constantine
a young man broken into warring fragments
caught between the pagan and the airborne angels
in a ménage à trois of his own imagining,
a listening at doors, confession half-heard,
on the Quirinale – an ugly doge – who fed her morsels
in return for which… Her laughing confidences
felled me like an axe… But then that night
me felice! by the shores of Tiber.
She half had pity on my peynes smerte
and O so lightly stepping from a doorway
where I gazed, strode eagerly on, to a life
undisclosed until today, where now she stands
the darling of the glossy supplement,
a part of everybody’s curiosity.
I look in vain for traces of the shattered youth
– white body stranded on the stygian bank –
in her sulphurous, broken-hearted pages.
I scarcely understood the merest portion,
and the little I got to taste, was bitter.
What of that? A magnet under iron filings
my lady of the rose pattern in the dust
emerges now, in bas-relief,
the language with the image dancing on.
Copyright Stephen Romer 2013
also by Stephen Romer: Screenings
