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MATT SIMPSON

Matt Simpson was born in Merseyside in 1936. His poetry collections include: Making Arrangements (1982), An Elegy for the Galosherman: New and Selected Poems (1990), Catching Up With History (1995), Getting There (2001) and In Deep (2006). He was also the author of four commentaries on Shakespeare’s plays, and was a frequent reviewer and contributor to anthologies for children. His collected essays were published in 2003 under the title Hugging the Shore. He was poet in residence in Tasmania in 1995, and his journal for this period (Cutting the Clouds Towards) was published in 1998. Until his retirement in 1998, he was senior lecturer in English at Liverpool Hope University. He died in 2009.

AN AUTUMN ROSE

So much, I know, depends on me.

Let’s be positive, you say.

Not always easy when, deprived of choice,

the ability to come and go at will,

I stiffen into glum resentment like a child

kept in and punishing the world with sulks.

When I try it works,

seems such a simple thing to do.

This morning I discover on my desk a rose

fetched from the garden, an October rose,

and by its side a shy lover’s letter shaming me,

thanking me for being kind.

TWIN BEDS IN VENICE

Judging from the pictures,

Hell looks the more

interesting place.

Japanese Senryū

I’m shaken by my friend’s account of how

in sleep I struggle with ‘demons’ half the night,

rev to climaxes that seem to want

to burst me out of it but seldom do. It’s as if

I’ve trudged across the Bridge of Sighs,

with one last glimpse of the hazed lagoon,

to slink and slump into the Doge’s dungeons, there

thrash about and whimper like the damned

in those fresco-Hells that we’ve been looking at

all week. I’d naively thought of sleep as decorous,

that what went on in dreams fussed only the mind.

Now it’s indecent, a betrayal of something intimate

by a self I do not, and can never, really know.

Yet if I did (albeit he’s no mate of mine, I can

imagine him a Trickster with Punchinello nose,

waggish jaw, hinting at secrets, a misdirected life),

would he be someone reading palms, dictating poems;

would I cadge or nick his mask and go to Hell

in Venice with that bad and dangerous man

who aptly named the Bridge?