Live Encounters Poetry & Writing August 2024
Rome, poems by Richard W. Halperin.
Rome, Summer of 2016
I am on the terrace of
my usual café, avenue de Villars.
The young waiter with the limp and the nice smile,
maybe me way back when so my heart goes out to him,
brings a second coffee.
Things are fine as they are, things are fine as they are.
A pull to Rome,
but I shall not go.
Its detestable Coliseum, the heat,
the absence now of Ingrid Bergman.
What is the difference between a Paris street –
the trees, the traffic, the people, a slipping of the masks –
the human face for a moment
openly dear – and a hospital?
So well captured in the novels of James T. Farrell,
No Star Is Lost, The Death of Nora Ryan.
Music is a signal from other worlds.
Open the envelope, there are piles of them
in the bedroom, in the kitchen.
In a few days Teri Murray will launch
her new book, but for a book like hers,
days don’t exist.
Clouds.
And people would rather watch television.
Letting Go the String
Utter mastery. Letting go the string.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
does this in A Letter to Three Wives.
Maugham does it in The Razor’s
Edge: On the first page, this is
what I shall do. On the last page,
I seem to have done it.
I have to mention suffering:
they have theirs, I have mine,
you have yours and no one’s
affair, that. ‘My yoke is easy,’
says Jesus. And, when I think it,
it is. But I seldom think it.
When an artist lets go the string,
my own suffering seems
suddenly dowdy. A string weighs
nothing at all.
Tea Shop in the Rain
Colour and light. Henry James.
Zinka Milanov. Chardin. Philip and
the eunuch in their little scene
in Acts. They begin to separate off
from the surfaces they have so
divinely imprinted. Venice in the rain.
Venice in the rain blurs whatever
distinctions there are among morning,
afternoon and evening. A teashop
in the pouring rain as seen from
the street. No idea what is going on
inside and everything is going on inside.
© Richard W. Halperin
Richard W. Halperin’s poetry is published by Salmon/Cliffs of Moher (four collections since 2010) and Lapwing/Belfast (eighteen shorter collections since 2014). In autumn 2024, Salmon will bring out a Selected & New Volume, Introduction by Joseph Woods, drawing upon most of these. The eighteenth Lapwing, Three Red Hats, appeared in July 2024.