HARRY RICKETTS
Good Looks
for Max
Here you are again; your handwriting, at least.
In my copy of Good Looks, page twelve, you’ve underlined
in pencil: The bodies are weapons, someone will die of them.
Did you just think it a good line? What did it mean to you
twenty-plus years ago? Against You must abandon
your pain, it is someone else’s (also underlined),
you’ve written a bit like 1965-6 Dylan
— as it is. There was a time, a long time,
I’d have rubbed it out as I started to in my Seamus Heaney
Selected Poems. But now all’s past amend, let the faint,
wavering marks stand, as though you’d just written them
— you’re smoking, of course, flicking ash, just like I do,
excited at your own thought, at the act of trespass,
still quick with promise, still friends with possibility.
Les Toits Rouges
Hans Neuermann in the preface
to his provocative study
Die Moderne und ihre Vorgänger
(1974) claims that the dark-blue,
oblong smear above the red roofs’
jumble and glow in that 1912 Vlaminck
hanging in the AGNSW
suggests the shape of a huge bird
of ill omen, wings spread wide,
or even (in the 1980 revised version)
the wings of a plane, presaging
World War 1. This latter theory
became something of an orthodoxy
until recent eco-critics like Stieffel and Bridge
pointed out that the smear more closely
resembles the rudderlike tail
of a blue whale about to submerge
into the white thrashing surf of the sky.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Harry Ricketts has published ten collections of poems, most recently Half Dark (VUP, 2015).