All is in retrospect ...     – Katherine Mansfield

And there’s his likeness: ‘Vase-Maker General
to the Universe,’
master of misnamed Etruria,
frock-coated, bewigged, buckled and breeched
in bronze, not porcelain, decorpsed, brushed down
and statued since 1863,

faux-Portland Vase
– a copy of his copies,
made for Jasperware gentries,
speaking
Enlightenment Greek on mantelpieces,
chiming sugared slave-songs when stirred –

aloft in one hand, a student’s empty Foster’s
in the other, as if now, alone, as Etruria
is taken over
not by Romans
but new imitators,
new creditors,

he’s retrospectively weighing up options.