The Green Man


The Walbrook, rising, heaving still,
has coated piles of ragstone bones
with sticky sterling-silver silt. Its banks
are lined with network rushes;
ranks of bundled reedy flutes; acanthus,
curling, stiffened. Fat-hen, crowfoot, hemlock,
sharp as Mappin cutlery and square-set,
barred and filtering and purposefully
prising out the layered lime and fortune sediment.
Paying, easing, paying still:
this for Mithras, that for Queen Victoria.

•

Falstaff, shirt-sleeves folded up - a clash
of pink and orange, angled P&O geometries -
is holding forth, a steaming pin-stripe liner.
He sits beside his funnel, round and bull-flanked,
gravy-greased and gouty. Former glories
in the field have made his reputation;
ribald tales of power lunches, credit and Canary wine
confirm his wit, although the years of talk and speculation
(dubiously cured, hung for taste) have left him
out-of-date and oddly-humoured.

•

Finance, Harvard-slick and slackened,
wireless and almost waxy,
slurs another wine-glass clean
as Falstaff lolls, all heavy-sacked,
all double-breasted.
Peers:
one, the old and lolling lard,
the nineteen-eighties Riot;
one, the other, glimmer grey,
belies their common age
in glimmer.
Watch:
this Finance, slurring glass
and aluminium, aluminum,
will rise and watch and glimmer still
in youth and wirelessly sparkle
ever younger; watch him straighten, shimmer,
face old Falstaff,
reach across
and take him by the nostrils.




Notes on the poem Photographs




© No Spinoza
2011