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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing July 2023
Strait Is the Gate, poems by Richard W. Halperin.
i. Strait Is the Gate
Gide was no fool.
Nor is the Bible.
Strait is the gate.
Love must be factored in.
Wide is the way of destruction.
Tyndale was tortured and killed
by order of Thomas More.
The loss is incalculable.
A man for all seasons
and the fifth is insanity.
I leave such odious subjects
as soon as I can. But I
cannot leave this aquarium
until I am given congé.
While in it, I must find – by
the grace of God or by
luck as in a Chinese restaurant –
those of like heart.
He who dwelleth in the secret place
of the Most High, the psalm begins.
The secret place is oneself.
When I die, the secret will be out.
ii. A Man, Alone
A man, alone, on a bleak country road
in Russia. I have the photograph.
The world knows him as Richter,
but only Richter knows the real Richter,
and no one’s affair, that.
Mark Twain tells readers they
will never have his true autobiography.
That that would consist of his thoughts,
‘the volcanic fires that toss and boil,
and never rest day and night. . . .
Every day would make a book
of eighty-thousand words.’
Jane Austen was also volcanic –
her six perfections come from that,
which I live with. As I live with
Richter’s Bach. As I live with
The Book of Job. As I live with
my late wife, whose life was not
entirely her own affair.
iii. They Too
iv. Dying in Venice
François Mitterrand, knowing he was dying,
loved to walk in Venice. Near the end,
I, too. I do not think death shimmers.
I do not think truth shimmers. But Venice
shimmers. It is the only city in which
I need neither courage nor fear. Its beauty
is that which Homer nails in The Iliad,
beauty which takes no responsibility –
none – for anything. Venice makes me know
that I have passed my whole life in fancy dress.
In Venice, the sea washes up on the stones.
Even the sea goes to Venice to die.
iv. Dying in Venice
François Mitterrand, knowing he was dying,
loved to walk in Venice. Near the end,
I, too. I do not think death shimmers.
I do not think truth shimmers. But Venice
shimmers. It is the only city in which
I need neither courage nor fear. Its beauty
is that which Homer nails in The Iliad,
beauty which takes no responsibility –
none – for anything. Venice makes me know
that I have passed my whole life in fancy dress.
In Venice, the sea washes up on the stones.
Even the sea goes to Venice to die.
© Richard W. Halperin
Richard W. Halperin’s poems are published by Salmon/Cliffs of Moher and by Lapwing/Belfast. Salmon has listed Selected & New Poems for Autumn 2023; it will draw upon poems from Mr. Halperin’s four Salmon and sixteen Lapwing collections, on the occasion of his 80th birthday. A new Lapwing, The Painted Word, will appear this Spring.