Bert Almon

10 Kensington Church Walk

Pound's old house
is now a poster shop
with Kensington Playboy Agencies upstairs
Well, some of the poems were bold as posters
and he managed to conduct a menage a trois in Rapallo

The house has no blue plaque
The campaign failed
his p o litical odour in the civic nostrils
being very bad
The house itself had a smell
the poet complained about
being a man with a vocation for complaints

He remade literature from this place
before he fell for Mussolini
Reading the letters you realize
he wanted to make the poems run on time
but he became the mad despatcher
and whole shipments went off the rails

Across the street the church
still has the bells Pound hated
He wrote a letter of complaint so witty
the vicar posted it in the vestry
but didn't mute the bells
a portent for a prophet

As a compromise a blue plaque
could be placed in the belfry
to keep company with the bats

---

Bert Almon was born in Texas and has lived in Canada since 1968. He has published several collections of poems. The most recent, "Earth Prime", from Brick Books, won the Poetry Award of the Writers' Guild of Alberta in 1996. His eighth collection, "Mind the Gap", will be published this year by Ekstasis Editions and conta i ns a series of poems about England, where he lived for a year in the 1980s. He won second prize in the Cardiff Festival Poetry Competition in 1991 and was a Hawthornden Fellow in 1993.

Tandem Contents