The Visitant

‘Bist du ein Engel? fragte das eine Kind.
Ich wollte, ich wär’ es, versetzte Mignon.’
Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre

‘You’re an angel,’ said the young man at our door
as he took a cardboard box from you
and I thought, yes, you are —
but one who has to get out of the house,
who feels the cold perpetually
like Mimi and her gelid hands,
who knows the land where an avenue’s trees
with lopped lower branches form
an entrance to the town …

Imagine, though transplanted far,
how further south in our hemisphere
she’d go to cure a childhood illness
at Monticelli Terme once,
a town among its bar umbrellas
solidified from somnolence, the place
for peace talks, local ones
where only lizards squabble under wrought-iron chairs.

Like a mirage in the heat-stunned plain,
here you are, love, here you are —
a woman formed from sun-struck air
as I picture you, before we met,
under an avenue of shaped plane trees
leading from that spit-sized thermal spa …

‘You’re an angel,’ as the man said at our door.

---

The Folly

Following a line of Bredon Hill
with Malverns so much cloud beyond,
our guide, she’d no idea
who had written that one …

Her mother, once an English teacher,
she’d loved poetry;
but something put the daughter off it,
our guide appeared to say.

And she told us how this cold’s
a lazy wind that blows
right through you in the Cotswolds;

it can’t be bothered going round you,
come here from the Urals
with nothing in its way.

We’d been waiting by that folly
for the others to descend,
exposed, our insignificance threatened.

Absentees had bought up all
we could survey, as she went on,
a deathly wealth, the stone
dead, rust oozing from a wall …

Purple bastard toadflax, our
guide said, and Lord Coventry’s desires
were realised for a bet, that tower
raised to light his beacon fires —

she told me, seeing round both those shires.