Ford Madox Ford & His Writer Friend

Books, women, the celebration
of another’s talent, a country meal,
a knowledge of birdsong,
who could ever defeat all that in you?

Still, a harassed man,
living always beside
the tear-wet face
with a desire to escape
what he once had loved

A courteous and troublesome animal

There were years he lied like a troubadour
standing near an open door,
gathering
what he knew, then going forth
on suburban roads, whistling
to test the range of a woodlark
or bluethroat,
depending on what valley
he entered or what far castle
he travelled to, the maiden indoors
he wants, who thinks
he thinks only of her

He knew earlier generations,
those barons and earls,
born among them, drops their names
into conversations in bars among the roughs,

writes lectures at sea approaching America,
converses with a woman on an ocean liner
through some archipelago
who performs in a women’s orchestra
He appears to barely listen. But he listens

He remembers the jade
in the night of her hair,
even if not remembering
for a moment, her name

His was always a life with three courtyards

He could have run away with her,
Ford tells his writer friend, the one
searching now for a plot

What he knows of craft
he never keeps to himself.
He knows water surfaces appear hard
in a Japanese garden. That a rock
in variable light and shadow
is soft as drapery, in the way he is
semi-cursive, leisurely on the surface

It makes women nod “imperceptibly” at him,
they somehow know he can
distract strangers from their nests,
this man on whom no gesture is lost