Calais

By Glyn Maxwell b. 1962 Glyn Maxwell

They tin-opened his head.

Apparently it said

CALAIS across his brain

in red. Which should explain

the puzzlement and pain

and focus that he felt,

that afternoon he smelt

its fuel-and-fishy air,

then mulled it over in a square

like one whom little girls

untasselling their hair

in French and combing it to curls

adore when he’s thirteen,

who wonders what on earth they mean

and guesses and is wrong,

goes pink and carries on,

finds the ferry gone.

Source: The Breakage: Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999)

Biography

Born in England to Welsh parents, Glyn Maxwell was educated at Oxford University and Boston University, where he studied both poetry and theater with Derek Walcott. This simultaneous training in two disciplines has enabled him to create innovative work across genres. Maxwell has written numerous verse plays as well as long narrative poems. The Sugar Mile (2005), a verse narrative set in a Manhattan bar a few days before . . .

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