Open that book on any page.
Out it spills, like one dead leaf –
Yourself in middle age
On a blind date. Her disbelief,

Suspicion, as you speak
Of Harry and Hermine,
The lonely man in the boarding-house,
The hostess on the scene

In a world of smoke and mirrors
Calling time, last orders please,
Between the crush of a Dublin bar
And the bottomless sleaze

Of Weimar . . . She would like,
She says, to be Haller’s daemon.
Nevertheless, there is always the clock
And how it ticks for women.

As you watch, her hair unbraids,
A snake at her back
Uncoiling, to the long white shock
Of a toothless old maid

In a fairytale. ‘Be not afraid
Of foxtrots, jazz and good-time girls.
The real world is the underworld.
There, mein lieb, we all get laid,

Intensity, ecstatic truth
Are everyone’s, at little risk
But childlessness, slow death –
And anyway, the Ball is Masked

As I am now . . .’
                                It was that night
You saw her, for the first and last time,
Vanishing, like second sight,
Through Irish rain and German autumn,

Promising she could always find you,
Harry Haller, in the book
From which, just yesterday, there shook
A dead leaf, to remind you.