1

Are the children singing come back
slap bang in the black sea of sex of gossip
buoyant on the good ship drink?

Here in 1951, springtide rising,
your silhouette postcard arrived.
How's the oily business treating you?

It's not everyday a ghost sends a message,
despite this absorbent card from Isfahan
blotched with shapely terms.

But this morning, with the circus of waking light
and the traffic of my life on the march,
the poetry god sits down to breakfast.

2

Tehran is depressing and half made;
we went by train to Ahwaz and Abadan,
saw four Iranians on a mud bank
in the middle of the river – contented.

The opium did not touch me,
unlike the beetroot vodka and glycerine beer
which had me flying over arboreal Shiraz,
the city of poets, Hafiz and Sa'di.

Caitlin – could we live together here,
in this dusty, sun-fried place?
Your letter made me want to die,
I went off to the hills with the geologists.

As for our technicolour lie,
the muslims and the nationalists
want shot of the Shah,
and how will we make our money then?

3

When Thomas read for the Anglo-Iranian Society
Bunting was not in the audience, he would return
later that year and go about his own dubious business;
apparently the reading left Mrs. Suralyir shivering with delight.

Why do I pursue this coincidence where none exists?
Both men were entangled in the politics of oil for gain;
if our peers were so involved we would enjoy hating them,
how we would revel in such irrelevance.

Bunting was a spy: Thomas a drunk.
In Country Sleep (1952), the dark enfolded hills of song.
The Spoils (1951), the moment of knowing, free of itself.
Voices drawn from a well deeper than history.

In their great flood of the music of water of music
a chorus explodes; sing sing you reckless bastards,
sing your headfull of singing birds
winging it across the drinkless desert.

 

Copyright © Kelvin Corcoran, 2006.

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Kelvin Corcoran lives in Cheltenham. His New & Selected Poems (2004) and When Suzy Was (2000) are published by Shearsman Books, and his 2005 pamphlet Helen Mania (Poetical Histories) was a Poetry Book Society Choice. His most recent publication is the chapbook Roger Hilton's Sugar, from Leafe Press of Nottingham.