Heaney
— “I half-knew we would never meet again.”
—“Station Island”
There wouldn’t be a way to say it,
wasn’t then. You looked well enough,
this time (not the last), and your hands
were steady. Your hair spilled over your
forehead and one sideburn ran an inch
longer than the other. You had your book
tucked clumsily into your jacket pocket.
You had kind things to say, sympathetic
answers to give to the young women
who hung upon your words and smiled.
The hour went by quickly. You didn’t
seem tired. The old glint flashed in your
eye. You signed your last book for me
and I gave you one of mine. You opened
it at random, and pointing, said, “This
one’s in rhyme.” I smiled and nodded.
We shook hands awkwardly, since the day
was far from over, then went for drinks
and dinner and a long rambling, bantered
conversation. Later that night, I read what
you had written: in the poetry chain-gang too.
Another Damozel
I saw a Pre-Raphaelite woman
walking down the street today
with just the step that Elizabeth
Siddel must have taken
when she walked out of her
paintings:
the same sad eyes,
the same slight smile, that frail,
lily-like beauty.
She glanced
sideways at me, as if she
were still dreaming of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
One Warm Evening
The evening was quite warm
and she might have gone out
for a walk and gotten lost or
distracted, or met someone she
had known and he had asked her
in for a drink and she, thinking
nothing about it, had accepted
before it occurred to her that
perhaps it wasn’t such a good
idea after all. By then it was too
late and he was telling her about
the time he had killed a squirrel
just for the fun of it and the way
he laughed about it might have
made her think twice about taking
another drink, but by then she
wasn’t thinking as clearly as she
might have been and he saw her
turn toward the door and shift
her eyes when she saw he’d seen
her watching and he laughed again
and she did too and then they
both knew it was probably too
late for anything else to be done.
Auden at the Opera
When Auden, in the last years,
lived at Kirchstetten, near Vienna,
he often went to the opera. He
refused to check his coat, as was
required. The ushers, knowing who
he was, argued with him about it,
but he never relented or surrendered
it. The ushers grumbled among
themselves and formulated plans
for various ways they might distract
him, then snatch his coat when he
wasn’t watching. After Auden died,
the ushers confessed that they missed
the quarrels they had had with him.
William Virgil Davis’s most recent book of poetry is Dismantlements of Silence: Poems Selected and New. He has published five other books of poetry: The Bones Poems; Landscape and Journey, which won the New Criterion Poetry Prize and the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for Poetry; Winter Light; The Dark Hours, which won the Calliope Press Chapbook Prize; One Way to Reconstruct the Scene, which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. His poems have appeared in most of the major periodicals, here and abroad, including Agenda, The Atlantic Monthly, Bennington Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, The Harvard Review, The Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, Literary Imagination, Literary Matters, The Nation, The Malahat Review, Missouri Review, The New Criterion, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Poetry, Raritan, The Sewanee Review, Southwest Review, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and The Yale Review, among many others.