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Curriculum vitae? Still alive.
Born - in 1945.
Prep and public school. Imprudent
Imbiber, yet a zealous student.
Oxford science. Why we breathe
At all, let alone conceive.
Research proved boring. On the whole
Science procrastinates the soul,
Whose true anatomy is hurt
Into the beautiful by art.
East Anglia University
Conferred an English Lit degree.
Next, six bright years of scrubbing wood
To earn an honest livelihood.
A carpenter. A fireman. ‘What the hell!’
We roared while clanging on the bell.
My first collection, cloth and printed
Like legal tender newly minted,
Looked on kitchen tables for
First love in 1974.
Disaster struck my proud young head.
Divorce, like marriage, starts in bed.
Trudging London, now a squatter,
Luck turned master of the matter.
A job in Sotheby’s, no less,
Cataloguing dead success.
The boneyard of literature I knew
In all its breadth at 32.
Pressure-cooked by such vocation,
I tasted breakdown for a season,
But, resurrected by the art
Of fiction, made a flying start
Out of myself into the story
Of one worse off, yet nudging glory.
Eddie Linden is his name
Of Irish, gay, and Catholic fame.
A job in Berkshire. Then the air
Of Greece (blue skies throughout a year)
Building a house in which to make
A poem for my dead friends’ sake;
And all who, death being sure predicted,
Find themselves a touch afflicted.
Seven years in that furnace, then
The poem like a horse was born
White hot, winged, and snorting fire.
In print, black ash, for sale or hire.
Now if you think this makes me sad,
There’s one last snippet to be had.
The Poetry Society. I met one there,
The soul and party, the affair
Of my mid-age, who brings me peace,
Her love, where paranoias cease.
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