Troubadour Poems: Martin Cook

Martin Cook's life has included soldiering, tea planting, advertising, marketing and social work--the kind of CV that once was almost de rigeur for a poet. His pamphlet, Mackerel Wrappers, was published in 2007.

Falling
After Chagall’s Los Novios del la Torre Eiffel

We should never have climbed that phallus.
We were, after all, Brits and when you heard
a squeaky fiddle playing Greensleeves
and thought you saw your pet goat taking off
from the Eiffel Tower towards Spain,
you went goofy and leant out to stop it.

I over-balanced trying to save you
but landed, with you in my arms
on a big duck with a cock’s comb.

You’d forgotten your goat and were
clutching a blue fan and dreaming of cherubs
while I had the Kama Sutra on my mind.

Neither grotesque birds nor angels
with violins and silly wings could save us;
we wasted an expensive wedding gown.