Wayne Auty

Selected Poems

Crows Over The Cornfield

Pulled into the market square
in Auvers-Sur-Oise
in front of the Mairie he
painted one sunny afternoon
over 100 years ago.

Across the road Auberge Ravoux,
the place he ate
and slept and mustered
up enough despair to create,
amongst other things,
his famous death.

The guide book
told us how they closed
and refurbished the place
in 1988 to make it
like it was in 1890.

We would go to eat
there later,
but first we would visit
the grave and the sites of some
of the famous paintings.

We came to the church first
(you know the one)
then up to the graveyard,
the stones carefully preserved
and marking the places
of the painter and his brother
who died of vd.

The pushchair was light
and cheap and English
like me,
and the wheels found
it impossible to negotiate
the route through the fields
back to town.

And of course
the meal was expensive
in Auberge Ravoux,
and the waiter,

finding children not
in fitting with the artistic
ambiance of the place,
was surly and unhelpful.

As we ate
I could almost hear the other diners
thinking this is the place where
he ate and drank,
and upstairs he thought
and slept and died
in that tiny front attic
bedroom.

From the menu
we had chosen pate, fish,
wine, bread.
At *475.00
it was expensive, I thought,
for what it was,
but in such a place
the high price is ubiquitous
I suppose.

You pay
not for the food
but for the
aura.
Everybody in town
wants a slice
of it.

Francoise Hardy Sings About Love

I saw her.

I must have been eight or nine
years old.

She was the most beautiful
woman I had ever seen
and the first I ever noticed.

She was on an album cover,
it was a school table top sale.

I bought the album.
It was called Francoise Hardy Sings About
Love.

On the front cover
there was a close-up colour profile of her,
and on the reverse a full length black
and white picture of her with a guitar.

Francoise Hardy Sings About
Love.

I could read the title
because it was in English,
but the names of the songs were in French
and I couldn't read French.

She sang in French too
so I didn't know what she was singing about,
but I didn't mind,
it just made her even more beautiful to me.

J' Aurais Voulu.
Avant De T'en Aller.
L'amour Ne Dure Pas Toujours.

As I listened to her I looked at her
eyes, her hair, the shape of her fingers.
I looked at my own fingers and wished they
were just like hers.

Wherever I went I found myself
looking at women and girls,
but none of them were as beautiful
as Francoise Hardy.
They were hardly anything at all.

Francoise Hardy Sings About
Love.

The label of the record
was bright yellow.

Marble Arch Recordings.

1964

Genevieve

finally,
to relax,
you even laughed,
and for the first time
I saw your oversized incisors
which set off your
Roman nose quite
beautifully.
And later that night
on your single bed
in your so small room
I laid on top of you
and kissed you.
You said,
"You really kissed me.
Nobody ever kissed me
like that. Kiss
me again."

At about four in the morning
your doorbell startled
us, you went downstairs
and I heard urgent talking
in the hall.
It went on for an hour
or more,
then you came back up
and began to get dressed.
"That was my ex-boyfriend,"
you said.
"I'm going out for a walk
with him,
and when I get back
I want you to be gone,
do you understand?"

I got up and made my journey
home naked,
clothes and shoes in hand.
It was not a long
walk home
as we know.

At the very same time
I closed your front
door I opened mine.

Later that day
you pushed a note
of exposition under my
door to unburden yourself,
but you really needn't have
bothered, Genevieve.
I felt a momentary sadness,
yes,
but to be honest
all I could think about was
The Lion, the Witch and
the Wardrobe and
Mr Benn.

Ice Station Zebra

To the restful and unimaginative
of the time,
who had no real way of knowing,
he was simply a crank, a crackpot.

And that his fortune
was handed down to him
attended no further input
from the collective public mind:
he was certainly a mad man.

The billionaire spent year upon year
of his later life
in hotel rooms
watching movies, eating junk food,
the windows blacked out to the world.

"Everybody carries germs around with them.
 I want to live longer than my parents,
so I avoid germs," he said.

Visitors had to stand in the desert
in a chalked out circle to be inspected
before they were allowed in the same building.

Even his doctor
had to examine him
from the other side of the room.

And about the room
there was no furniture
but for a bed and a chair,
there were no personal belongings
except for a 16mm film projector
and a screen.

It is claimed the the once handsome man's
finger nails grew into claws,
and his hair and beard hung about
his waist in a varnish of grease.
He was quite emaciated.

Only three times in fifteen years
did he agree to meet anyone

from the outside world.

On one such occasion he had his hair
and beard cut,
his nails trimmed and polished.

His left thumbnail, however,
remained one half inch long.
He got it squared off.

"That's my screwdriver," he said.
"Don't trim my screwdriver too short."

His favourite films were action-adventures,
and it is claimed he sat through
his absolute favourite one
one hundred and fifty two times

- non-stop.

Remember Fontainbleau?

I saw you in the playpen,
you watching your infant daughter,
me, my infant son.
Much time had passed
and there we were
again in a mutual space.
I wanted to say
remember that bedroom
in Old Trafford
when you were at university
and I was pretending
to be Jack Kerouac?
I wanted to say
remember that night?
I no longer recall
how it started
but of course
we were drinking,
and the next thing
I'm ranting like Lenny Bruce
but you were the only one
shouting any truths.
Then you knocked the TV
off its stand
and there was a bang, smoke,
the reek of burning wires.
It was my TV
so I went for your stereo
throwing it at the wall,
but it only bounced back
and thinking it hadn't broke
I threw it once again
slicing my hand open
on its innards.
But in the rage of the moment
I didn't feel any pain,
notice the blood.
And you went for my
essential if underused
typewriter,
hurling all 10kg of that
Remington steel and plastic
with all the might
your skinny biceps

could muster.
But you missed and when I
threw it back it glanced
across your forehead.
Yet more blood,
but we hadn't finished
yet.

Up to our knees
in rubber coloured balls
all this time later
I wanted to say
remember the next
morning when we awoke
and the room was trashed and we
lay huddled on that
bare mattress
soaked black in our blood?
We observed the scene
amazed,
as if we had had no part in
the wreckage,
then we went downstairs
and made sardines on toast,
but we couldn't eat them
because we couldn't hold our
cutlery in our
injured fingers.
We laughed at the literary
necessity of it all.
I'm Scott and your Zelda,
I said.
I remember saying it.
I'm Plath and you're Hughes
you said,
and we kissed across
the formica coated table top.

All this was many years ago
and you've put on a little weight
in the time that has passed.
But I wanted to say something,
something like remember

Fontainebleau?
Remember what you did
to me in the palace gardens?
Remember what I did to you?
It was good times that night
as many of our nights
together were.
I wanted to mention it,
but I said nothing of the kind.
Maybe next time I see you
I will say it then.
Remember Fontainebleau
I will say.
or maybe you will say
something similar
to me.  

The Cowboys

my friend Benny died
last week
it was the funeral
yesterday
and despite my hatred
of God
and gatherings and
what seem to me to be
mindless hollow ceremonies
I went
to pay my respects to
a man who toiled for
thirty years collecting
up the rubbish of the city
and a further fifteen
potwashing in a dumb-fuck
spirit crippling truckstop.

Benny always had something
to say
and he normally said it
three times in a row
to anyone who would listen
not wanting to let it go
until you laughed
along with him
and his laugh was a hoarse
throaty heart-felt
jump-start of a wheeze
and would end
with him doubled over
coughing up fifty
years of those cheap
stinking Richmond cigarettes
he chain smoked.

but Benny won't be laughing
or smoking anymore
as we know
and after his funeral
in the pub
after everyone else had gone
and the disingenuous
artificial laughter had dissolved

into the night
like so many
inappropriately dropped
stale farts
I considered something.

I considered how
unlike the cowboys
in the old films Benny
admired so much
he would soon be
forgotten.

and as I considered this
I thought to myself
fuck Bobby Ryan
fuck Billy Holden
Deano
the Duke
Bob Mitchum
Charlie Bronson
short-arse Alan Ladd
and the man with no name.

Fuck them all.

my friend Benny
was more of a man
than any single one
of them.

Copyright

©

Wayne Auty

2009