TRIP TO ELTHAM PALACE POEM 8

A friend of mine once told me, just before watching the MET film of Rigoletto in the Summer season, that to find out if someone loves you, you must let them go. If they come back, they do. Now in my imaginings, I had the vision of a yo-yo back and forth in the city of New York, as there was so much choice and so few needs to communicate with each other. Imagine my surprise, when having left that dear country, I found that the yo-yo had come back to me!

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“If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die.” William Shakespeare

Impasse

I walked along the frozen path,

The fodder hid beneath a pearly layer,

Of untouched solid dew,

The sound was doubled and I turned.

A figure tall and noble stood,

I did not know him from familiarity,

Or touch or life’s blood full-thickened

In the vein but did.

A charger runs with no more intent,

But there is an end to which he runs,

And laboured is his breath,

Only for a while till his

Well-deserved rest is accomplished.

Accosted by his violent glare,

I did not understand,

How he came to be in this foreign land,

My country of origin but of no business,

To him or others of consequence.

We had no place to turn,

Fenced in as we were,

Emotions high my glare was

No less violent.

“But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.” Gabriel García Márquez