Poetry In Motion

“Black Jackets”

Thom Gunn.

In the silence that prolongs the span

Rawly of music when the record ends,

The red-haired boy who drove a van

In weekday overalls but, like his friends,

Wore motorcycle boots and jacket here

To suit the Sunday hangout he was in,

Heard, as he stretched back from his beer,

Leather creak softly round his neck and chin.

Before him on a coal-black sleeve

Remote exertion had lined, scratched and burned

Insignia that could not revive

The heroic fall or climb where they were earned.

On the other drinkers bent together,

Concocting selves for their impervious kit,

He saw it as no more than leather

Which, taut across the shoulders grown to it,

Sent through the dimness of a bar,

As sudden and anonymous hints of light

As those that shipping give, that are

Now flickers in the Bay, now lost in sight.

He stretched out like a cat, and rolled

The bitterish taste of beer upon his tongue,

And listened to a joke being told:

The present was the things he stayed among.

If it was only loss he wore,

He wore it to assert, with fierce devotion,

Complicity and nothing more.

He recollected his initiation,

And one especially of the rites.
For on his shoulders they had put tattoos:
The group's name on the left, The Knights,
And on the right the slogan Born to Lose.