Between

Roy, speaking to the dead 

became your speciality. For me, 

it’s a one-off. Or no such choice: 

an RIP tweet with a snap of ‘Sets’ online 

appeared and disappeared within minutes, 

indiscretion and discretion at once. 

You were gone, twice. On 

the bus to town I was alert 

and, of course, 

your double got on, bidden by 

an inauspicious stop: 

wispy remains of hair cast free 

at the sides, 

this studied neglect 

a touch of bohemianism, 

counterpointing thin lips, 

undeveloped chin, 

obdurately English, wrapped 

in an affable scarf. 

It was you, just post-retirement, 

encouraging and free. 

I didn’t 

get to check the hands, 

whether they could take on 

a standard upright with sunken ivories, 

before he erupted with 

a coughing sneeze – 

zaum spasm – 

resonant and sudden enough to wake the dead 

and the living 

and all those in between. 22nd March 2017 

Previously published in Tears in the Fence 68 (Autumn 2018) 

Robert Sheppard completed his PhD (partly) on the work of Roy Fisher, and he has latterly written on his work in The Poetry of Saying (LUP 2005) and elsewhere. With Peter Robinson he edited the 2000 celebration of Fisher's work, News for the Ear. His latest books were published simultaneously by Shearsman in August 2024, the prose work The Necessity of Poetics, and the third volume of his transpositions of traditional sonnets, this one tracking the hubris of brexit colliding with the incompetence surrounding Covid, British Standards.

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