ref/verential

Ezra Pound

Horizontal on a deckchair in the ward
of the criminal mad....A man without shoestrings clawing
the Social Credit broadside from your table, you saying,
"...here with a black suit and black briefcase; in the brief,
an abomination, Possum's hommage to Milton."
Then sprung; Rapallo, and the decade done;
and three years later, Eliot dead, you saying,
"Who's left alive to understand my jokes?
My old Brother in the arts...besides, he was a smash of a poet."
You showed me your blotched, bent hands, saying, "Worms.
When I talked that nonsense about Jews on the Rome
wireless, Olga knew it was shit, and still loved me."
And I, "Who else had been in Purgatory?"
You, "I began with a swelled head and end with swelled feet."

- Robert Lowell