Poem In Memoriam T. S. Eliot

I'd been out the night before & hadn't seen the papers or the telly & the next day in a café someone told me you were dead And it was as if a favourite distant uncle had died old hands in the big strange room/new shiny presents at Christmas and I didn't know what to feel. For years I measured out my life with your coffee spoons Your poems on the table in dusty bed sitters Playing an L.P. of you reading on wet interrupted January afternoons Meanwhile, back at the Wasteland: Maureen OHara in a lowcut dress staggers across Rhyl sandhills Lovers in Liverpool pubs eating passion fruit Reading Alfred de Vigny in the lavatory Opening an old grand piano and finding it smelling of curry THE STAR OF INDIA FOUND IN A BUS STATION Making love in a darkened room hearing an old woman having a fit on the landing The first snowflakes of winter falling on her Christmas poem for me in Piccadilly Gardens The first signs of spring in plastic daffodils on city counters Lovers kissing Rain fallin Dogs running Night falling And you `familiar compound spirit' moving silently down Canning St in a night of rain and fog.