The Billiard Room

The Billiard Room

The Billiard Room

The play of his power,
the living, you can smell
it in this room: the cues glitter like weapons,
the green nap of the table
was a battle ground for him where conflicts broke
in the strategy of a game.

And I remember hearing,
at night above my head,
the sound of a glass breaking and a burst
of rich laughter: then silence,
except for the powerful tread, the pacing
from angle to angle,
and the crack of a cannon
as the white slammed into the red. It’s
all snuffed out now of course, like a long
Havana cigar, a Hoyo de Monterey perhaps,
smoked down for an inch or two, and never
much more. The act has gone, his gesture,
casual on an evening thirty years ago,
is obsolete: now
only a sense of ritual
pervades the room and feeds
familiar on the tokens of his power:

a German ceremonial sword,
he captured in South West, stands rigid
in a shell case: against one wall an old
propeller rots (and somewhere stuck in a drawer
there’s an album showing photographs of the crash)
so that objects of steel and brass, records
of dead encounter, have made this room
a potent place, the temple of my caste
where I must pay homage, the sour pietas
of son to father, the unforgiving
love that looks for only one thing in the past:
conflict as barren as dust. I have no God
but a giant who paces above my head,
who blusters nightly that in his turn
my son shall have his saga of Fee, Fie, Fum,
to grind my bones to make his bread.

Though I stand by a half opened window
and breathe in the air,
the dust still stirs about me,
raised by a step on the floor,
and the smell that comes up is the smell of old power,
unbreaking love, unfinished war.