I still have my orange-covered copy
of the Penguin Modern Poets selected Rilke
though the only poems that interest me in it now
are ‘Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes’ and the go
he had at the pompous task of writing
one’s own epitaph (his is rather good)
and floating on the front RMR’s brooding face
from brows to chin prompted one silly girl
to tell me how compelling his eyes were
something he in fact made handy use of in life
when persuading some noble lady or other to lend him
a castle or chateau to compose immortally in
according to the price pencilled on the flyleaf
the book cost me 80c new in the currently fabled 60s
my Omar Khayyam years of a book of verse
a beer and a packet of twenty at a reasonable outlay
