By Richard Berengarten.

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Rimbaud

Precocious pupil, teenage layabout,
He’s played provincial brat, brash schoolboy slut,
Barbarian beast, filthy louse-ridden mutt—
Until piss-artist drink-mates chuck him out;
Absinthe and argot mingling in his throat,
Teacher’s best pet, deranged, turns foul-slanged slob,
Illumination-seeker, cannon-gob,
Working his passage on a drunken boat.

And then he’s twenty-two. And poetry stops.
And then, as if he’s cleaned up, done the cure,
And doesn’t need the hit, crack, high (or crutch?),
His previous life, he says, has been rinçures—
Rinsewater, dishswirl, drainwaste, sloshmurk, slops—
Yeah, been there, done that, thank you very much.

◊

Rimbaud et la Bouche d’Ombre

He ran away. Pushed off. He couldn’t stand
His mother’s sour-faced jibes a moment longer,
Her cheek-slaps, ear-tweaks, reprimands. Pent anger
Brimmed and spurted. His poems, till then bland,
Blistered, blaspheming—foul-mouthed, fuelled, fanned
By teenage rage—intricate, stranger, stronger,
They burst in brilliant bolts as if the finger
Of god—or fiend—had touched his writing hand.

But when at last the ghastly cancer gripped—
A leg (cut off), groin, loins, lungs, guts, an arm—
He called for her. She came, saw, and departed.
The Mouth of Shadow gaped, then shut, tight-lipped.
She had her work cut out back on the farm,
Pragmatic, tidy-minded, bitter-hearted.

♦

Richard Berengarten’s books include: The Blue Butterfly, For the Living, The Manager, Book With No Back Cover, Imagems (1),  Manual, Notness (Metaphysical Sonnets), Changing, Imagems 2, The Wine Cup, Under Balkan Light, Balkan Spaces (essays) and, most recently, with Will Hill, DYAD. His writings have been translated into more than 90 languages. Tributes on his 80th birthday (2023) appear here, and he is anthologised on The Poetry Archive. He is a former Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, Bye-Fellow at Downing College, and Academic Advisor at Pembroke College (Cambridge). The Fortnightly Review has published his Ringing the Changes, Poems from Changing, Memoir on Octavio Paz, On the Spirit of Poetry in a Time of Plague, and Five Sonnets in Honour of Sir Walter Raleigh.