I couldn’t help it, she was Parisian

I couldn’t help it, she was Parisian

and leaned her head back when she smiled, which was

teasing/ and magnificent,

I passed through Montmartre this summer, in fact.

The leaves were already falling.

Why am I writing

in this predictable English metre?

Probably all the Yeats

in the A-Level class at Stoke Newington

with the student Polydorou. What a name, ’many gifts’ in Greek,

straight out of the Iliad;

I took some students in Piazza Armerina

cherubim for explorational play

and adults for conversation,

enough to pay for diesel, tolls and ferry boats

to Greece, and back perhaps

to that closed-up room

of a sickly Edwardian child,

the oiled-wood hall

on the dripping wet rock

green with sea-moss

that they call England.