Serenade For Tuba

This poem is at present linked back from the POETRY PANTRY.

Poetry Pantry provides opportunity for poets to let others see their earlier work.  This was my first ever published poem, appearing in the mid-70's in the Carcanet Press "Scottish Poetry 8"

SERENADE FOR TUBA

  Come up and greet my jolly, golden solace.

Through here! She voices best in gurgling bathrooms.

Stroke - she won't bite - her close coiled, shining cloisters . . .

A gin-crazed plumber, in to fix the ball-cock

swooned when his gaze rolled round those crotcheted pipings . .

Your smile leers massive, from burnished haunch reflected.

Fondle her foghorn face. I think she likes you.

Sit! Sit! I'll clasp her close and get her going.

I fell for her, my hippo, in a junk-shop.

She squatted, three-pound-ten, a chubby bargain.

A friendly welder patched one tattered buttock.

Ignore choleric thumps from upstairs neighbours.

My rondos resonating with their windows

enrage her cat which claws his potted cacti.

Ex-R.A.F., his tracer drills my ceiling.

Give him his way, he'd melt her down for bullets.

Have suitors, faint as simpering glockenspiels

stitched frills to hot-eyed love with lace flutes needling,

entombed their caverned lusts in lowing cellos,

or scraped and sidled with seductive fiddles?

I, triple-tongued and three crooked fingers pumping,

lip firm with lung in heartfelt syncopation

will plight a fat-cheeked troth that shakes the sternum.

Our mammoth blasts bring hearts' defences tumbling.

Lips purse. Trial puffs fan distant, dripping cellars.

Stirred echoes faintly wander spiralled sewers . . .

(This melancholy mastodon of music

fair uses up the Brasso, I can tell you.)

Now eggs of sorrow in her tin bowels hatching

trundle her ghostly, subterranean gloamings,

soar to the flaring spaces of her belfry.

And OOMPAH roars its challenge to despair.