Gold

Author:

Paul Muldoon

for Gerard Quinn

You loomed like Merlin

over the class

of 1962,

your soutane

pocket like the scar

of an appendectomy.

Only the year before

old Frost

had swung the lead

in hailing Kennedy —

A golden age

of poetry and power.

Twenty years on you reach

into the breast

of your wind-cheater

for a red pencil:

'All cancelled.

Nothing Gold Can Stay.'

Not the dead weight

of a grouse

flaunted from an open car.

Not Soutine's

Hare on a Green Shutter.

Not Marilyn.

From The Poetry Review January 1984.

Reproduced with kind permission of the poet.

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