Charles Hood, Dead Sailor Museum
The Haunt of Aphrodite
A classical scholar now, he grandiosely thinks,
Ah yes, the haunt of Aphrodite. For here had been
the cinema, Astoria, the Saturday dates with Carys,
lovely as only seventeen and very first girl can be.
Four decades on, the town’s main street is quieter.
A scholar, he loves the mosque and its being there.
Other newcomers, like the Turkish hot towel shave,
just seem profoundly not his fishing port youth.
One of the cafés, the Italians, is still there, quiet,
changed hands, but still museum-piece the same,
but the steam-blast espresso den of their youth
has gone, like the pub where they carolled at Christmas.
All scholars know of history’s determining.
He knows how fishing dwindled, economic stuff.
But he still thinks of the youthful steam in the café,
and Carys Venus, her form, their first embrace.
______________________
Robert Nisbet
Review by Paul Jones
The overlay of past and present, the memory of first love tied to a place that has moved on even as memory has not, that is the stuff we’re introduced to in this poem. Yes there is a feeling of loss, but also of kinds of continuity and of positive changes. The intellectual awareness of how time changes a place meeting—never abandoning—the emotional landscape.
“All scholars know of history’s determining.
He knows how fishing dwindled, economic stuff.
But he still thinks of the youthful steam in the café,
and Carys Venus, her form, their first embrace.”