Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2025
Crossing the Illusion, poems by Richard W Halperin.
Crossing the Illusion
No one knows what a dragonfly is.
No one knows what it does.
I think it carries things away
but I have never seen one carry anything away.
Crossing the river
Crossing the illusion
A friend recommended I read the poetry of Henry Vaughan.
I tried.
A dragonfly does for me what Vaughan does for others.
Crossing the river
Crossing the illusion
My wife once gave me a very good hairbrush.
Here it still is.
She isn’t.
Another Veronica
I overheard a woman saying to a friend
‘Halfway into the conversation, I realised
he was speaking about another Veronica.’
That sometimes happens, of course.
But how many Veronicas was each Veronica?
I know in my case I am multiple
Richards, some of whom I can sense,
some of whom I suspect. Real focus
could see all the Richards at once.
My wife could see all the Richards
at once. Who else could do that?
Mycroft Holmes? Jesus? Love can do that.
A Paisley Shawl
A Calm Eagerness
Years ago in Ireland I heard at Mass
a priest give a homily on Mary:
that she is barely in the Gospels
or in Acts, but that her presence
then and now is enormous. He ended
the homily by saying, ‘How then does
all this affect the way we live our lives?’
Mary affects the way I live mine. How,
is private. My life is also affected by
certain entities, which I make small
if I call them ‘literature.’ These include,
recently – as my country of birth inflicts
torment on itself and on the rest of
the world; for nothing – the poems
of Robert Frost and The Great Gatsby.
They are written with a calm eagerness.
Years ago in Paris, where I live,
I went to hear a monologue spoken by
an actor and written by a young playwright
who, one evening in 2015 when he was
at home minding the baby, learned
that his wife was one of those killed
in the Bataclan massacre. The monologue
reproduced, as best art can do, his feelings
and his life that night and during the days
and years which followed. Which follow.
He entitled the piece Vous n’aurez pas
ma haine. You shall not have my hate.
If you have my hate, you will have won.
You will never win.
Elegance
The thread of it is unbreakable.
I look at a painting of an
eighteenth-century German park:
trees, fountains, paths, laid out in
perfect symmetry. If it poured rain –
and there must be rain – the design
would remain untainted.
Wilhelm Kempff playing
The Goldberg Variations has to do
with this.
Gene Tierney in films has to do
with this. ‘Belle composition par
Gène Tierney’ wrote a critic recently
about her Mrs Muir.
Experience – mine – can never
be passed on to anyone.
I can see – because I choose to –
Gene Tierney walking through it.
© Richard W Halperin
Richard W. Halperin is a U.S./Irish dual national living in Paris. His poetry is published by Salmon (four collections) and by Lapwing (eighteen smaller collections.). In Autumn 2025, Salmon will bring out All the Tattered Stars: New and Selected Poems, Introduction by Joseph Woods.