Family Man
My double relishes his freedom to move
through narrative and time. You’ll find him
in the trunks of burned-out cars,
in the cat seat of history, riding pillion
as the motorcade fails to take the bend.
On the red carpet, just behind the stars,
he whispers poison in each lovely ear.
He’s the sine qua non, the ne plus ultra,
the hand chained to the plague ship’s tiller,
the indispensable figure of the fifth act.
But now he’s taken to hanging round the house,
not picking up, showing the boy amusing tricks
and games to play with string. I’m bored,
my double tells me, and:- how can you stand
to live this way? I look into his empty face.
You’re the one who chose to fall in love, I say.
Notes
“Family Man” was published in JAAM 27 (2009), edited by Ingrid Horrocks, and I plan to include it in my forthcoming collection “Men Briefly Explained”.
‘The indispensable figure of the fifth act’ is an epithet applied to himself by Pechorin, the anti-hero of Mikhail Lermontov’s great early Russian novel A Hero Of Our Time, in the translation by Paul Foote. For what it’s worth, Pechorin – named after the River Pechora in Russia – is a double of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, named after the River Onega. I’m not sure I had that in mind when I wrote the poem, though.
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