trout

Eloquentia

Jan Kemp

for Ian Wedde

Great to be back inside your head that hour you read
busking your way into ours Horace basking alongside

the boom lowered to the commonplace &
that sail your bursting heart lifting up Mt Victoria—

a glorious day 'one out of the box' golden boy of the sixties
at 55 balding black-besuited still maybe shouting fuck inside

but no longer needing to behave badly talking friends/fathering/
storms of taste cooked up in the kitchen/your Gemini twin brother

& your own father's fading into the pale Agfa horizon
of his coloured slides from six tin trunks how I remember

your mother on the Karnifuli river boat tossing the piss
overboard how what mattered was not to waste a minute.

Hearing you is a swim in what you name for us so lightly
the mirror you've held up to lieutenant life who looks

back at you getting wiser sadder the reviewers say getting truer
it's humbling the man sitting next to me remarks to hear you

the pick of our generation—lush ebullient intellectual bullshit
artist of the first water still 'making waves' where our hearts beach

hauling in your net to pick through the days of where we've been
and might be. The banal but lifted. Paradise yes, 'but earthly'.

It's good you say its shaky sand you prefer
to stand on. It throws the view right out.