Anthony Thwaite

My dark Brazilian friend, seventy years back In Washington. Both of us were foreign, On the edge of Gordon Junior High. After my English prep-school shine wore off, My grades slid down and I lost interest In most things, except stamps and snakes and sex. We visited the embassies, cadging stamps, And messed about off Massachusetts Avenue Playing the hub-cap trick on passing cars (You threw one...

These little steps and quivers Remind me of my mother’s, Yet now they are made by me In part-senility – Gestures and postures passed Across the years, not lost But, as if imitated, Put on and animated By limbs, and flesh, and features, With movements and with gestures, So that what was me Becomes this parody, Shuddering and moving on In jerks, till I have gone For...

The famous poet’s mistress, forty years ago, Now heard five times a week on radio Acting an ageing upper-class virago.

‘The deadbeats of the Caves de France, the suicidal’, The substance of a novelist’s rapt recall, One who escaped the death from alcohol.

The ravaged visage of a copywriter Who was an intimate of him and her, Encountered at the funeral of another.

And...

Down in the creek, snakes: Snakes in the opposite wood. There were snakes everywhere. This was new. This was good.

At home in England, snakes Were pets you kept in a cage. Here they slipped free, and swam. This was a golden age.

Most folk I knew hated snakes, Shrank if I brought one back And let it run over my arm Or gathered and then lay slack.

Whipsnakes, cornsnakes, snakes Swollen, and...