Meditações - to slow the tempo

In Me as the Swans

Not embittered  

even while freezing  

to the ice of their own lakes.  

 

The night I was leaving for Madrid  

into the noisy party a dazzling  

friend-of-a-friend walked in: I want so much  

(as a couple of kids on the dance floor want)  

to slow the tempo, hold there longer,  

to feel that seedly longing  

to be pressed into the soil,  

or that little lift the mothers get  

when stocking larders, even now,  

vestige of the primitive urge  

to be provided for and to provide.  

 

          I went alone to see that balcony  

in Verona, after the Roman dramas and luxuries  

above the Spanish Steps, when an elegant  

footman brought a pack of Reds on a silver  

tray and all but smoked them for you;  

after your towels had warmed in London’s best  

hotel, whose name I can’t remember and am kind of glad,  

glad now for the rest of empty August and  

the convent hostel’s eleven o’clock curfew,  

glad now when I go to the distinguished dinners  

that I have stood alone  

wondering at illuminated books,  

looking at Woolf’s spectacles under glass  

or standing under Bourgeois’s giant spider  

at the Tate—at times the best kept universe  

was my own, no interceding docents  

or guided tours, but a riverine serendipitous  

wandering—waif, naïf.

 

                   I liked the light enormously so why  

did I obey the bell that called me in?

Leslie Williams