John Talbot

Thirty Years Later

Small himself, he had heard passages

           Of a larger music all around,

           And thought: if he could get that sound

On paper, if he could impress

Her with its tincture, grace, and force,

           She’d hear, within the wider song,

           Some strain to which they’d both belong,

That she might recognize as theirs.

 * * *

What was his name? She’d never tell.

           She was too canny to release

           His banished shade to mar her peace –

She’d chosen another and chosen well.

So she kept it down when a mirror jarred

           Her midlife satisfaction just

           Enough to stir, from out the dust,

Some notes of that music he had heard.

Something I Said

She voiced (but her own words and tone

           Were so unlike this paraphrase)

           Sorrow that summer’s last ripe days

Were gone. We left her there alone,

And as we drove away, her room

           (I brightly chirped) was brightly lit:

           Your mother must be glad to sit

Snug and untouched by this wet and gloom.

But that was when I felt a blunt

           Bisection of our atmosphere:

           The weather in our heated car

Turned chill. Exactly what affront

Subdued you had – for me – no name.

           Each callow effort to appease

           With unpersuasive pleasantries

Revived some old Adamic shame.

Too boyish, far too newly wed,

           Older than you but suddenly younger,

           I’d have preferred some schoolmarm anger –

Chastening dope-slaps to the head –

To this obscure and knowing hurt

           Coiled inside you, poised to strike

           But never striking.

John Talbot’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Yale Review, The New Criterion, The Spectator, The Dark Horse, First Things, The American Scholar, and many others, as well as in anthologies from W. W. Norton, Yale University Press, and Waywiser. He has published two volumes of poems and many articles, reviews, chapters, and books on English, Greek, and Latin literature – most recently a volume on C. H. Sisson, co-edited with the scholar and poet Victoria Moul.