Poem
Patrick McGuinness
Leaving Do, by Liviu Campanu
Leaving Do, by Liviu Campanu
Leaving Do, by Liviu Campanu
An ordinary day at work, except that it’s your last:the pull of the new job, the new house . . . you’ve only been half-here,
living out of suitcases – sometimes with me, sometimes
with the husband who does not know I borrowed you.
Someone’s head talks platitudes over warm Ukrainian fizz;
they present you with the card we signed using that biro on a string
that’s been hanging from the calendar since before either of us came.
I’ll tune out, become the centre of my own leaving do, because,
well, that’s what your leaving does.
Later, from a dip of broken
slats on the beer garden bench, I’ll face the tram stop where
you carefully missed your last ride home, and watch something
indistinct that’s been hanging in the sky all day,
and longer than all day: this morning’s taut blue air fattening
into cloud, choking on a filler of lemon-coloured haze.
© 2013, Patrick McGuinness
This poem purports to be a translation of a poem by Romanian poet Liviu Campanu. Campanu is a fictional character, who appears in Patrick McGuinness\' novel The Last Hundred Days.
Patrick McGuinness
(Tunisia, 1968)
Patrick McGuinness is a poet, novelist, translator and academic, a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, where he has taught since 1998. He lives in North West Wales. His poetry, published by Carcanet, has won an Eric Gregory Award, the American Poetry Foundations Levinson Prize in 2003, the Poetry Business Prize in 2006, ...
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Leaving Do, by Liviu Campanu
An ordinary day at work, except that it’s your last:the pull of the new job, the new house . . . you’ve only been half-here,
living out of suitcases – sometimes with me, sometimes
with the husband who does not know I borrowed you.
Someone’s head talks platitudes over warm Ukrainian fizz;
they present you with the card we signed using that biro on a string
that’s been hanging from the calendar since before either of us came.
I’ll tune out, become the centre of my own leaving do, because,
well, that’s what your leaving does.
Later, from a dip of broken
slats on the beer garden bench, I’ll face the tram stop where
you carefully missed your last ride home, and watch something
indistinct that’s been hanging in the sky all day,
and longer than all day: this morning’s taut blue air fattening
into cloud, choking on a filler of lemon-coloured haze.
Leaving Do, by Liviu Campanu
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