Sylvian Elegy

You would be 90 now.
At least if cancer or
one of the other thousand shocks
hadn’t gored you on its horns.
Surprised to learn that you left

in ‘63, when intercourse too late
came both for me and Philip Larkin,
I won’t pretend to know even for this
what you’d be like now. A wrinkled prune
perhaps, leaving ill-judged thoughts

on Twitter as the verse, now grown
and hued beyond the greenhouse shades
of sickly green, a corpse behind the ferns,
keeps pouring out. The Egg Rock suicides
would never have their patroness,

the suicidal bees their queen,
the birthday letters left unopened on
your ex-husband’s nightstand. Upon
the pin of isolated faults converging
as events we dance, behavioural theories

made flesh. And so the icon sits in aspic,
a coloured two-piece bathing suit
against a black-and-white shoreline,
a shock of blonde preserved
by Feb 11th of a long-dead lunar year.