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LETTER
TO CRISPIN
1993
I
write to you, who are still part of me
but
living in a country where the ways
are
strange, of course, as I once found them too:
lone
lodgings, an empty fairground foreignness,
odd fricatives of sight and smell,
motel vowels everywhere,
love’s labials
and
the guttural fixation of ambition.
I
write to you, addictively, to send
messages
back in time which natural law
permits
no answer to, like ‘What new chart,
plotted
from outer space by satellite,
exists to show what turn to take,
what hostelries soul must avoid,
what magic lakes,
what
markets, harbours must be visited?’
I
write to you, to where the action is,
from
my inertial study late at night,
to
say: Dear boy, you are my past renewed,
whether
the maps or languages make sense,
your courage, fitter than mine,
can open the door in the foreign film
and taste the breeze
of
weekend drives along new mountain bends.
I
write to you reminding both of us
outside
the homesick room there’s piquant air,
and
the first thrill of it leads on to more;
beyond
each city there’s another city.
For you at twenty-five, prepared,
and still for me with luck maybe
are always
those
life-extensions we are anxious for.
I
write to you with hope and celebration
of
foreignness, of all that’s wide and far:
a
petrol stop along the Riviera,
a
dream that’s suddenly a home, and real,
of being far off from our start,
of short waits, long days doing,
surrendering
to
the outlandish with an innocent trust.
Alan
Marshfield
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