A chess tournament, played on lamp-lit tables,
Rages in the bowels of the theatre.
I see faces craggy from shadows; I see many a pursed lip.
And in the ballroom, beneath brocaded tangerine lampshades,
Amateurs butcher Argentinian tango.
I attend a troubling triple hatchet murder in suite 33.
Inspector Kasparov, tall and Sherlockian,
Tallies suspects on a rotatable whiteboard.
After much rhetoric, we torch the sheets
In the car park behind the staff entrance.
Come ten, lovers pace the tennis courts –
Which, with nets disengaged, look naked and afraid –
And I catch sullen Julian, Dressed in lavender,
Sitting prim atop a polished bronze bar stool.
Tonight, after my scheduled pool game
With Mistress Warwick and Simone de Beauvoir,
I will write letters to my lovers in Mumbai.
They will visit, all of them,
When the pink cherry trees from southern Japan
Bloom beside the bowels’ green.
The Hotel 