Aquarium

Chapter 27: Pastorale

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About This Book

A sequence of vivid lyric poems juxtaposes urban modernity and sensual escapism, shifting between images of aquaria, industrial streets, cathedrals, cabarets and cultivated gardens. Rich sensory detail and decadent diction evoke crowded factories, neon-lit cafés, and intimate interiors while poems alternate social satire, melancholic reverie and pastoral relief. Several pieces use theatrical vignettes and musical rhythms to render characters and scenes indirectly, while others address sacred space, memory and longing through ornate imagery. The book’s structure groups shorter, imagistic poems into two parts that balance urban manners with curving, often erotic or elegiac, meditations.

Pastorale

I RAN into the garden, for the breeze

Was clean and keen and warming to the skin

Like some Peruvian pepper soaked in gin

It forced me to contract into a sneeze.

I ran into the garden, for the sky

Was like a freshly-tinted muslin gown

Which makes the choir-boys gape, the parson frown,

His daughters, envying, look on and sigh.

I ran into the garden, for the sun

Summoned the daisies in their new-washed frills,

Summoned the cowslips and the daffodils

To gay Spring’s festival, each one by one.

I watched the blossoms with the dew in pearls,

The Spring puffed flippancies into my mind

And thoughts too abstract to have been defined

By any but the chaffinch twittering.