[ilds] Peter Porter

[Bruce Redwine]

The following memorial to Peter Porter was written by Sean O'Brien and appeared in the 30 July 2010 issue of The Times Literary Supplement.  Porter edited an anthology of Durrell's poems, Lawrence Durrell:  Selected Poems (London 2006).  O'Brien's eulogy reminds me of Lawrence Durrell's poetry.  I'm not sure why:  perhaps the locale in the Midi, perhaps the setting, perhaps the chatty melancholy, perhaps the tone of "the last of the wine."  The poem is also Keatsian and has much of the last great odes, "To Autumn," in particular.  I think Porter would like the poem, maybe LD too.


Leavetaking

In memory of Peter Porter


In a draughty terrace bar
Beside the cave at Château Ventenac,
And lapped by the green Midi canal,
I take my leave, old friend,
By raising une pression and not
The Minervois that you would recommend.
Bad news prefers its poison cold and long.
The news has not improved so far —
So, keep the decent bottle in the rack
For later, for the "decent interval"
That death like a bureaucracy requires.

Or maybe neck it in the midnight heat
Up at the house when everyone's in bed,
At one end of the huge white tablecloth,
At which a Nazi colonel also sat
To sample the warm south
While waiting for the war to end —
The kind of fact you would absorb
For later, but there is no later now.
Flute-playing psychopaths all must
Like cats and poets come to dust,
But I will not be reconciled.

The evening boats slide in
Last autumn's leaves still piled
Along their guttering and in the seats
Of plastic chairs left out on deck
In token of a former merriment
In which I am required to believe
When the patron, a rugby star
From some time back, limps past
To put another freezing glass beside the last,
Then fire the oven up with grubbed-up vines
And stand admiring its crimson speech
As though like alcohol it were
A kind of poetry.  My friend,
Is there sufficient detail for you yet?
You'd know much faster than I ever could
The point at which the orchestration starts
And evening is converted into art.

La patronne with her brutal crop
And wide-girl suit comes out
To criticize the styling of the blaze.
The grinning barman comes by bicycle
And finds their bickering, the bar,
The voices from the dim canal, the flicker
Of the bunting's spectral tricolores
A stage to serve his wordless drollery:
These are perhaps our characters, but where's
The crowd to fill the choruses
Of black-edged pastoral?
The world, you'd say, exists
Not to be understood
But to demand conviction.  I assent,
As if it matters, and the dancers have arrived,
Cool, pink-pastelled blondes who
In another life have raised
A parapluie at Cherbourg, squired
By lupine George Chakirises in black.

This is the world, or part of it.
They do not think themselves Shakespearean,
Although you might, were we to sit
Besides the water here, me with une pression
And you among the quiet notes you will transform
Into a poem in the high nine hundreds.
I have not learned your lesson yet.
Work is good, like love and company
But these so-courteous deaths, who sweep
Their maidens up and down the shore
In perfect silence on their light fantastic feet
(When did the music stop?), insist
That they are quite another thing,
Sent from a place less beautiful than this
But just as carefully designed,
That shade beyond the trees and the canal,
Where evening ends, and songs likewise,
And there is no one left to sing.


SEAN O'BRIEN
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