On a recent trip to London I went into the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery and looked at the Piero della Francescas. I hadn’t slept much the night before.
Later I wrote this poem-which I’ve edited but will now put away and get out weeks, even months, from now to edit again. I started off with a vaguely humorous idea, but that wasn’t what the poem wanted to be…it wanted to be something much more serious…
Meeting Piero della Francesca in Pizza Express
in The Strand.
Coming in from light and fountains I narrow my vision
choose a table, cradle the weight of insomniac limbs on the plastic
chair, pick up a menu.
I’m not hungry for pizza, just to sit down.
I like the idea of the chequered floor and marble tables
I want to take my eyes out and rest them on the veins.
You bring me iced water, used to thin paint, soothe
mountains, sing pale streams; bird-egg blue, grey dove
float above the muzak
you stand beside me your halo a saucer of gold
pencil poised to where the drawing shows through
your body solid geometry.
You take my order, I catch your symmetry
watch your mathematician’s finger raise in the pause
before inspiration
remember how, introduced at seventeen we met nightly
in the fossil cove, stole midnight walks across frost
lawns under coated trees.
I decided to adopt you then when slides spun
in a new world, I thought – I’ll make you my favourite painter too
that will be something
for the future, for the person I want to be – but only now
notebook on marble, beside the half-eaten Margherita
do I taste this gift of another’s passion.