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Klee/Clover
作者Author  /  Tom  Paulin  湯姆.波林

Klee/Clover

Tom Paulin

 
Nightwatch after nightwatch
Paul Klee endured

'horribly boring guard duty'

at the gasoline cellar

and every morning

outside the Zeppelin hangar

there was drill then a speech

tacked with junk formulas

he varnished wings

and stencilled numbers
next to gothic insignia

a private first-class

with a lippy dislike

of their royal majesties

and Flying School 5 (Bavaria)

he wrote home to Lily
it's nice this spring weather
and now we've laid out a garden
between the second and third runways
the airfield's becoming
more and more beautiful

each time a plane crashed
- and that happened quite often

he cut squares of canvas

from the wings and fuselage

he never said why

but every smashed biplane

looked daft or ridiculous

halfjoky and untrue
- maybe the pilots annoyed him?

those unlovely aristos
who never knew they were flying

primed blank canvases

into his beautiful airfield. 

   
***This poem is from Tom Paulin's Walking a Line
Copyright © 1994
Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber 2003
   
 
   
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