I Was Waiting For This

A pipe burst in the kitchen. I was in the next room and heard it break- and got the stop-cock turned before the house filled up with water. Ailz called a plumber and the man was on the road somewhere in our vicinity and got here and had the pipe mended within an hour. This is going to cost us our insurers £75.

I followed your advice last night and left a tap dripping.

La Dolce Vita

My friend purple_pen has a user-pic that shows Anita Ekberg- in the most famous sequence from La Dolce Vita- dancing in the Trevi fountain. Seeing this put me in mind of a poem I wrote- just after Christmas- in miserable weather-  about twelve years ago.  I called it up on screen, tinkered with it a bit and- here it is...

                                               
                                                La Dolce Vita

 

                                    Outside it’s Christmas, but on TV-

                                    For all the horror of emptiness-

                                    It's Rome and August- the lucky sods....

 

                                    …Only it wasn’t- not in good faith.

                                    Anita Ekberg has blown the gaffe.

                                    That scene where she dances in the fountain

                                    (Not incidentally the real thing

                                    But a plaster mock-up at Cinecitta)

                                    Her toes were froze; it was January.

                                    So what we're seeing ain't nature, not

                                    A top-heavy starlet prancing about

                                    In brainless abandon but actually acting-

                                    Bloody good acting too, my loves.

Untranslatable

Another poem of roughly the same vintage- and similarly wintry.

UNTRANSLATABLE

 

Winter, wolves, Grey brother padding

The frozen streets with his yellow eyes,

The old dead out on Mountfaucon gibbet,

Creaking with ice....

 

                             I’ve tried translating

La Heaulmiere. It ends like this...

 

And so all human beauty ends

I've got arthritis everywhere.

My spinal column twists and bends.

My breasts, don’t ask, have gone a terre.

My stomach is in bad repair.

And no-one's going to want to eat

My pussy now. I've skin to spare,

Mottled and flecked like sausage meat

 

And so the talk goes round and round

About the good times that we had,

Poor biddies sitting on the ground

Like faggots round a fire. How sad.

First come the good times then the bad.

The fire flares up but soon goes cold.

We used to be so bloody mad

But in the end we all grow old.

 

Yes, but it’s neither ancient nor modern

Is it? What do I call the woman?

There’s not a lot of armouresses

About these days. “The foxy babe

Who worked in defence has a bit of a moan.”

Don’t worry. That’s a joke (I think)

But what’s her context?

 

                             Last winter’s snows-

Untranslatable. Best lyric poem

Written by anyone, anytime, any place....               

 

...But conceivable only then,

With Paris no more than a big village,

The language new.

 

                   I could blag it so

You’d believe I remembered a former life

As a scholar in the middle ages.

I’d draw on Hugo, Henley, Stevenson,

Even Kipling (see above)

To give you a Paris to touch and feel

And smell. The taverns, Notre Dame,

And Margot squashing Villon flat,

 

 But I wouldn’t be able to do his coldness.