Ezra Pound at the Bank

        What does it avail? He waits at the withdrawal counter

          Third in line The clerk's a young man, long shiny hair

            Delicate fingers, he counts the notes like a pianist

       His suit's too big at the shoulders, the stripes hang stiff

               His watch is outsize, gleaming with diamante

                          We are far from the city

 

 

         'The ant's a centaur...'  The poet digs from his pocket

             A folded cheque. To be smoothed and scanned

  An exhibit flattened on the counter. The clerk looks up, he smiles

            Such radiance as...'the hills skip like young rams'

The slow afternoon waits meanwhile for an arrival foretold, the ship

                        With one sail, square rigged

 

      A disciple waits at the tower. Who would read to the poet

      From his own work, but rendered in a language unknown

                'What thou lovest best...' but it's just a drone

       And the disciple carries a secret that passes the poet by

           Stifled in his prophetic beard and by forgetfulness

                           The wreck of his humanity

 

     The colours he once wore have been replaced by honour orsomething

                      Resembling that bleak and ethereal castle

     The smiling bodies sprawled in sweat and contentment are substituted

            By carcasses heaped in a ditch, by purity or by a riff pretending

                              To that high and untruthful quality

                                  The vanity that scorns vanity

 

         With pleasured hands the clerk counts the banknotes, offers them

                                           His palm upward

            Dogs lie breathless on the hot pavement, the white dust rises

         Slumps back again. Meaning, perhaps,has been lost or has hidden

     In the slow descent of the clerk's hand. He must go now out into the road

                          There is no other exchange to be made