The Writer As Libertine by Paul Squires

(A honeymoon waltz)

an idea like a decadent intoxicant whereby,
in character, one can discover
that armed with acoustical resonance, one
can conjure a silk future too
in which wigs and wit return us
to Versailles.

(after, with memories of eminence, I manifest
Caliban in a nightclub amid sprites, raging
Against Curs’d Fate which enslaved his witch mother
to the arrogant masteries of Prospero
and experiencing epyphynys
with dancers whose nakedness
hid a naked life.)

then Strauss in Vienna in August
as autumn turned in on itself and
under white lace décolletage
the masked ladies
soft skin touched by delicate ribbons of
sound, by the waltz and the sense of eternity
in the architecture, shivered,

the last age in which eminence was celebrated
gives way inevitably to a chaos
of hangovers in sunlit motel rooms
surrounded by bottles and two bodies strewn
in velvet dressing-gowns, ours,

Remind me again of the Russians,
The Hermitage, the tears which struck that marble floor, ours,
at one man’s slender
momentary
tenderness for his new wife,
in white marble, in the waltz,
etheria made eternal

thru violins in gypsy camps at night
since Europe is in decline,
again,
in Prague,

where finally, in a garden, we slept
glowing under chandeliers of stars.




Paul Squires, Australia