Meeting Piero della Francesca in Pizza Express

On a recent trip to London I went into the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery and looked at the Piero della Francescas. I hadn’t slept much the night before.

Later I wrote this poem-which I’ve edited but will now put away and get out weeks, even months, from now to edit again. I started off with a vaguely humorous idea, but that wasn’t what the poem wanted to be…it wanted to be something much more serious…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meeting Piero della Francesca in Pizza Express

in The Strand.

Coming in from light and fountains I narrow my vision

choose a table, cradle the weight of insomniac limbs on the plastic

chair, pick up a menu.

 

I’m not hungry for pizza, just to sit down.

I like the idea of the chequered floor and marble tables

I want to take my eyes out and rest them on the veins.

 

You bring me iced water, used to thin paint, soothe

mountains, sing pale streams; bird-egg blue, grey dove

float above the muzak

 

you stand beside me your halo a saucer of gold

pencil poised to where the drawing shows through

your body solid geometry.

 

You take my order, I catch your symmetry

watch your mathematician’s finger raise in the pause

before inspiration

 

remember how, introduced  at seventeen we met nightly

in the fossil cove, stole midnight walks across frost

lawns under coated trees.

 

I decided to adopt you then when slides spun

in a new world, I thought – I’ll make you my favourite painter too

that will be something

 

for the future, for the person I want to be – but only now

notebook on marble, beside the half-eaten Margherita

do I taste this gift of another’s passion.