i.m. John Wareham

 

The tide of chance may bring
Its offer; but nought avails it!

THE OPPORTUNITY Thomas Hardy

 

Each week on Tuesday promptly at seven –

chicken curry and chips from Barry Wong’s

on West Derby Road at the ready –

he and I would turn on the TV

in our rented rooms to watch Hughie Greene’s

‘Opportunity Knocks’.  It was an hour –

including adverts – of metaphors

of the mid-sixties: kitsch; schmaltz; condescension;

nudge-nudge; the cruelty of class; fifteen

seconds of fame; occasional talents.

 

We had no doubt we were poets – actual

not aspiring. Would we settle for minor

recognition – or would only major count?

How this would happen we never discussed.

Maybe we hoped we would be discovered

like others in their twenties in the city!

 

I can see him now chortling at the absurd –

his laughter bubbling, his kindly eyes gleeful.

He was an admirer of Thomas Hardy,

ever the collector of the bathos

of pretentiousness and misfortune.

He told me tales about the writer’s heart.

Hardy had willed, though an atheist,

his body be buried in the churchyard

of the village in which he had been born.

But his young widow was strong-armed by the Dean

of Westminster Abbey. Her husband’s ashes

were interred in Poets’ Corner near Dickens’.

His heart, however, was preserved, and borne

in a biscuit tin – Huntley & Palmers

Bath Olivers, it was claimed – from Paddington

or Waterloo to Dorchester then Stinsford.

One tale had the heart buried in the tin.

Another, the tin being on the grave digger’s

kitchen table with, for some reason, the lid

off, maintained the family cat ate it.

 

He published little. Re-reading what he wrote

when we lodged together in Liverpool

I am shocked by the matureness of his talent,

and his ability to make the mundane

original, significant, portentous:

Spareness is the point.

November’s manifest in skies of ash,

Branches whittled by the edge

Of winter, the parkland quite

Quit of final birds.

And how his, over years, has shaped my work,

like an underground, uncharted watercourse.