The large and paunchy man,
with straddled legs and slippered feet,
paddling across a hotel floor
to sit because he cannot stand,
evokes the picture I recall
of a clumsy boy of eighteen years
who lives within his image still,
his slow, intelligent, sickly smile
the ponderous speech,
head tilted to one side
in the same evasive way.
Professor of Mathematics now,
married and widowed,
his cup is otherwise full.
Asked once at school how life
would ravel out, his mind was clear.
The Latin manuscripts of Newton
sufficed him for a lifetime.
And so they have. Academia
crowns his balding head,
paraphernalia weighing more
with him, no doubt, than many
increments of flesh.
He never shunned his origins,
the poverty of his home,
the red-brick terraced house,
fronting the street. No garden,
but a garden flowers in his mind
alongside Newton, Virgil, Horace
and the memory of Class Five,
the boys - professors, jokers,
bankers, lawyers and deceased -
whom we revive an hour or more,
in the lees of our reunion year.
©Terry Hodgson2003
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