Poem Of The Week: 'Something Beautiful In Café Nero' By Ben Ray

Ben Ray

Something beautiful in Café Nero
for Claud

In the antiquated palace of my memories
the frescoes are all in primary colours
and there are doors that I fear to look behind
for fear of structural collapse.
So when you strode back into my present
and pushed back the walls to finally let in light
I was so utterly grateful that you were still You.
Glasses on, bag slung back, a smile in corporeal form.
We sat down and opened up the dam
swapped our pasts, our love lives and love of life
and found, with relief, that the waters hadn’t ebbed
that our shorelines were still recognisable.
And I’m left thinking, thank god you’re here –
there is too much tea and too much talk in this world
for you not to exist in mine.

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Ben Ray’s careful accommodation of the past in the present is symptomatic of a capacious imagination given to wide, sometimes compelled reflection. That he cannot, or will not, corner his quarry – the opening of painfully-storied doors may ‘collapse’ the edifice of memory entire – does not, ironically, restrict his propensity for figurative suggestion; Ray’s interior and exterior landscapes occupy the same mental plane. He looks outward and inward at the same time, which is no doubt why he uses metaphors of landscape and place so effectively.

Reaching, as he does elsewhere, for images that express a cleaving towards mental space – the ‘antiquated palaces’ and dimly-perceived ‘shorelines’ – he will not exchange the glittering cavern for the snare of the unlit passage.

And we feel his near-elemental surprise as he finds, in the banal setting of a Nero with its surfeit of tea and talk, the promise of his own past reflected back unchanged. The vision – a ‘smile in corporeal form’ – is that past embodied, as miraculously unaltered as to suggest a resurrection.

A moment of epiphany no less startling than finding Jesus in Cookham, the revelation is a cause for unchained joy. The light administered by the visitant illuminates shared histories, a breaking of bread befitting the consummation of this fine poem’s concluding lines.

‘Something beautiful in Café Nero’ is taken from What I Heard on the Last Cassette Player in the World and is published by Indigo Dreams

More information here: https://www.indigodreams.co.uk/ben-ray-2/4594632077