I’d heard the words before, but I shall hear them

forever, or what passes for forever

in human life, and as I’ve heard them now for years, as

Peppino said them, with a ponderousness

which was disarming if you chose to find it so,

as we did, his friends, his fellow-students

and I, the tutor, taking meals with them

in the summer school at a Cambridge college,

because his ever-present sense of wonder

and openness was like a flower among us.

L’homme n’est qu’un roseau, he intoned,

pausing as he fixed his big round eyes

in turn on at least several of us,

before delivering the Pascal punchline:

mais c’est un roseau pensant. His French accent

wasn’t bad, though he wasn’t fluent,

so each word was delivered carefully,

and pensant came out with a midi accent,

the a flattening from dance towards stand.

 

Pensant. We looked back at him, reflecting

that Peppino was perhaps a bulky reed,

tall and as weighty as his way of talking,

but contemplating with him the two sides

of human nature brought into sharp focus,

not only registering the mystery

for ourselves of our power and frailty

combined in one experience, but feeling

as if we looked out from inside Peppino

his childlike wonder, holding in one hand

up to the light, like a shell he’d discovered

on a southern beach, the first proposition,

and in the other hand another shell

which miraculously fitted with it.

 

Peppino had waves of melancholy,

and another lad, quiet, observant,

took on himself equally charmingly

the role of protector, witness, conscience,

and when we hadn’t seen our mascot lately

it was he who said to us, where’s Peppino?

and we’d pool our recollections of when

we’d last seen him, whether he’d seemed OK.

 

There was an academic whose books I’d read

who stalked through the hall with other dons

under the lofty ceiling of the type

called hammer beam, a striking figure,

so upright he actually leaned backwards,

a habit which conveyed pomposity

undimmed by a belly like a football

he might almost have been about to offer

to High Table like a Christmas pudding.

 

Peppino told us how he’d been to see him

to ask his advice on further study.

With puzzlement Peppino described how he,

this distinguished scholar, had got up

from behind his desk and gone towards the door

of his office and opened it and stood there

beside it, saying only, I don’t know

how I can help you, and Peppino

understood he was being asked to leave,

though he didn’t need to tell us this,

he just repeated what the man had said,

and looked at us with his wondering round eyes.

 

While it sank in, and we all felt for him,

all the conversations at all the tables

halted a moment as a roar of laughter

rang out from the table on the dais,

and we all turned to see the don in question,

with his buck teeth and his mouth wide open,

and light reflected off his spectacles,

as if he had been mocking our Peppino.

 

The love and anger that we felt burned in

to consciousness like a flame. It hasn’t died.