After the disappointment
of the confit de canard
and the ‘no shows’
of those I’d planned to see
a face looms up right
at the death, whale-like
with shy pinprick eyes
and then all in a rush
just as the taxis arrive
I’m being told memory
is vivid even though
his House had been Queen’s
mine Marryott and that
I’d been good at sport,
he hopeless. Fifty years on
he still recalls our earnest
talk of books. Yet of him
my file is a guilty blank,
shows nothing of the German
boy whose parents thought
a year in England would
do him good. Oddly, I start
to well — that sense
of life as ledger
what gained
what lost, implacable
as the summons
of a schooltime bell.
