Jonathan Wonham

A MOVEABLE FEAST

I had a little bust of Hemingway in plastic
which was really no different than a bust in marble
only it was lighter, and more realistic.

Every day I walked the rue de Fleurus
and the windswept place du Panthéon
stopping off at the café on the place St-Michel

that Hemingway says he uses
to write that story about being up in Michigan
when the boys are drinking –

just the thought of which makes him thirsty, sitting there,
while it’s blowing the end of Fall outside
so that in his story it’s blowing too

and that’s what he calls
transplanting himself. Which I like because
it’s like me, like, I’ve transplanted myself

into this kind of great story, sitting
talking to a bunch of US high school girls
who say they’ve come to Paris

to look for the graves of Papa Hemingway
and Bob Dylan. I said you’re crazy and proved it
on the internet at Findagrave.com

which showed straight away he was buried in Ketchum.
Ketchum, Idaho. You know what Americans say about Idaho?
They say it’s where the potatoes grow!

Ketchum don’t seem quite appropriate somehow
as a place for a moveable feast to come to rest.
But I guess it might be though.

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THE INTERVAL

You can't go faster than the music
but you can have 'REPLAY'
written in gold across your chest.

I write this as a new way of building walls
around the palaces in their dust.
Because I've seen that it's just
a short march
to the reed-curtained marshes
and the girls wearing chequered headscarves.

Take their glances
and escape
down avenues lined with tin pans
where a white egret more than music
can help you to survive
the next hundred years.

But also, follow them to the interval,
their long brown backs thrown over their shoulders
their eyes hard shiny black
as watermelon seeds.

In the interval, every mother will be watching
her daughter's impression
of a rabbit falling down
or a tortoise coursing through the sand
or a frog edging through the reeds.

Then, like a boy with no laces in his boots,
one of them will wait for you
by the river, beyond the walnut tree
and she will tell you
she has invented a new pig
from the shadow of a trout
and you will be free to laugh
if you so wish.

Be not an old man with white hair
in your cellar
selling carpets made from history.
If it was ever thus, she would disappear
leaving the seller of carpets made from history
to be the someone in the cellar.

She comes here to wait by the river
where the urns have cracked
and to be the boy with no laces in his boots
flushing a frog from the pattern
of the carpet, making a tortoise with his hand,
falling down before you in an impression
of her own mother

louder than a white egret now
louder than the music
her hair bleached cold as a fridge
her breasts entombed with dust.

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FACTOR 30

All the lifelong day
I lay counting, in this place,
your one two three four five lower vertebrae.

With a peculiar, louche grace
you took the hand-held fan from your holdall
and buzzed it over your face.

A mask of lotion stalled
the unrelenting sun, but still allowed
what one might even call

a photograph to develop: the field ploughed
by your fingers, a ghostly white track
and a pink sunset that glowed

in the small of your back.

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