The leaves release their light.
Bees, the fuchsia’s guzzlers,
quit their day routine as
somewhere a voice alls,
“Come inside.” No need,
sitting here, to tame
the inside table’s
fresh disorder. Or, going
further, mind whether
amid our silhouetted hills
you need elect blind chance
as the designer which offered up
the adapted fish
for dinner. Everything’s
complete and steady
as rooftops beneath the stars:
the past and future
fold in the breadth
of all the air. Till wait -
now of a sudden, later,
its all so lidded, silent
for no waking reason;
it seems a brink.
Unless it’s a crater
one plummets into speaking
the towns two urgent
syllables. Then try repeating:
“Dark clouds over Siberia”
and “I write with Russian ink”.



Thanks to research and dissemination
in the Daily Telegraph, it’s confirmed
there are accents, ever remote
from speech’s main street that inspire
trust and, therefore, customers
to set free as words their worthy quids.

To that end, service industries
might shift there or - it’s not reported -
employees could just mimic the accent
of that region. It’s true, we all
want to be cared for - even on the phone
when dealing with a firm

which given an opening (see
the fine print) will vanish through it.
Now, happily, the accent, fast echoing,
will be just for you. This is good.
The stereo’s walked or, better, the house
is smoke and there’s a caring accent

right on cue. Duw, Duw*, if concern’s from Wales:
the choice of many. Or, if in this country,
where accents breach regional
sensitivities, a pause perhaps
while care germinates across the breadth
of a chosen State. It will vary.

The catch is, it just can’t last.
1 hose favoured vowels, from some Appalachian saddle,
will be tumbled to or robbed. Soon,
the caring accents are duly gone. Unless,
to turn an honest dollar, they become
the ones that really cared all along.

* God, God



The title of Graham Greene’s unpublished first novel

Let me spare you a black and white
snap: it’s the holder of the camera
I’d shake. God, how I wanted

those covers, hard or limp, at the stylish
behest of some publisher - not that
bottom drawer, this archive, where air

is a fiction and I, the type
who knows his lines backwards
yet refuses to speak, flee

your notice, reader, and dream.
Of pages riffled, turned or creased;
claret spilt approvingly on page sixty-three.

Or Sherry, since he’s your biographer,
Graham. My saviour - see the index -
I thus toast. To our trinity. To words,

the body of, that serve us both.
Two fat volumes for a life outpiloting death
while I laze in the wake of what you wrote.

Well may Heinemann sigh, the trollop
with its cheap advances. The world
is a fiction but this is a fact:

I, Anthony Sant, stand rejected -
on the shelf, written off, a tale
nevertheless. Successful, in my reams,

as another survivor of Russian roulette.
Dear Graham, if in me, sentence
by sentence, your life was proved,

who’s to say I’m not really the author
of you? Spin me forwards or back.
Truth neatly escapes all covers, perhaps.

Could it be the title didn’t live?
Sant. Old French. Nickname -
irony bedded and bred. Your piety,

dear saintly progenitors, should receive credit.
Try calling the present, collect, under S.
The news is, the name, unlike those of the trades,

has a death-wish in the A to Z.
London nurses the odd hundred, Rome
fashions forty-six. Here my research,

brisk in this atmosphere, catches its breath:
in the antipodes several labour in bed. List me
among those who saved the name from the dead.

Dear Graham, Huck Finn, Jane Eyre,
David Copperfield, Ulysses, Macbeth,
Lolita, Moby Dick... Anthony Sant - enough said?

Then, in an Oxford Companion
to the verse of this century,
I struck the name: SANT, Andrew.

A companion! For real? He’d need a dream
of a hot couplet in those gales
strafing his base in Tasmania. Though, cheerily,

nothing from his opus assails me.
Proof he’s truly a brother, a chum,
a bulwark in such dark hours,

as publishers know, when readers
fail to erupt. Ah, far less risk
besets the unpublished manuscript.

Now, charged with text, I gather
my strength: let author, title,
publisher, those suspect companions,

be damned. Of readers or critics
I relinquish my need; leave “Sant”
to the reams of that poet. Beam.

Incorruptible as an unseen star. Give
or take a well-battered classic, none
outlast a smart autonomous narrative.

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