for Paul

 

Going upstairs, I think of him still

in the bathroom, crooning. It's Danny Boy

or some doomed melody dredged up

from a past we're unable to share.

Nearly all of the words are missing

as he tries half-heartedly to reinvent them;

while the tune is sprightly,

pepped up for a night on the tiles.

 

When I played my records he told me

that music always needed a lilt,

a syrupy air you could hum

like a song of John McCormack's.

I was into the blues, the sax,

significance: no way that Muddy

or Dylan could sing!

 

His judgments were mostly like that:

definitive, unbending, like his sense of style

marooned in the nineteen fifties,

when the rest of us came along –

his wild locks restrained,

sleeked down with a blob of Brylcreem.