SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING
I
As the four of us part, she and I
Kiss politely, and as we bend
Cheek to cheek, our hands resting
Gently on each other’s shoulders
Do I feel what I want to feel
Her drawing me just a little closer
Letting me feel what I do feel
The weight of her breasts against me
A promise, soft, unspoken
Saying she to me, and I to her,
Were you free, here I am,
Her gentle pressure teazing me
With that old, delightful question
How like you this? (Much too
Much, of course.) Or, and I fear
In this or lies the truth, they are,
Aren’t they, so damn big that
Contact thus will happen, kissing?
II
Whatever, with that kiss I know
It’ll be months before we meet again
And if there’s been no beginning here
There’s no conversation now to have unhad
No words working us towards an end
Which bodies out my shifting sense
Of our willingness to talk. Pleased
I remember last night, when they all three
Were chatting round the kitchen-table,
Removed and comfortable on a sofa
I read the paper; then sometime later
She came through and sitting close
Talked to me, of the war at first
Happening in the world she comes from,
Then race, and culture, and British life,
And so by some transition I have lost
To the front row of a theatre, and there
Meeting the eye of an actor unabashed
Straight into a tale of virtual seduction,
‘We did everything, absolutely everything
Except have sex,’ rounding her lips
And dragging hard on a dying roll-up
As she said this―though I would rather
She had said, ‘Except make love’
For sex is such a naked business,
Love a little better dressed; but that,
You know, was not a moral wish,
For in this story she wanted most
To tell, there was not much of love
Nor in me, her chosen audience,
Silent yet complicit in this open act
Of imagined faithlessness: for years
She has lived with and loved, I believe,
The woman we have come to visit.
Her story she knows they would not
Have her tell, nor let me listen to,
For in those two there’s a faithfulness
Not at work in us. So, for half an hour
Into them and us we are re-paired,
And listening I wonder if this isn’t also
A revival of the scene she is rehearsing
Trying out a power new and now
A need in her, not fenced here
Behind the safety of pit or proscenium,
Intimate, dangerous, though in deed
Still safe enough, working strangely
Towards whatever end has forced
This power forth.
III
That I ponder too,
Remembering her a parent to children
Not her own, not much younger than herself,
Helping, from twenty odd to thirty plus,
Whom she loved through their hardest years,
No longer children now, gone or going
From this household, she almost stranded
Between a future without the media-made
Name, or fame, or fortune which I,
Kept, comfortable and contemptuous of all
But ancient goods, believe she makes
Too much of, and a past still damaging,
Dark with undisclosed abuse, a childhood
I’ve only heard hints of, her family
Not kind as kin should be, damage
Which those years of dedication sought
To repair: now almost unfamilied again,
And stranded among lives not her own
Clumsily I think, ‘She wants a child,
A life to care for always, a family
To be the heart of.’
Her story ends
And getting up we go back to the kitchen
Knowing we’ve been too long away,
For a conversation just polite. I think
They think so too, but kind say nothing
To disturb each other. That story though
Still works in me, a chancing infidelity
So secret that were it mine, untold
I’d’ve kept it quiet from everyone:
But spoken of, her I want unkindly
To re-tell it, us all to talk about it.
Yet trying to turn our words that way
I find there something too serious
To risk their laughing at, too intimate
For the talk taking us lightly through supper
And so to bed.
IV
Where awake and restless, I listen for noises
From the next room, glad to know only
A silence, a stillness. But a car passes,
A rush of sound rising and falling,
Hopeless the night moves on.
Her unhad I want, silent
Those words working gently to unbutton
The casual truthes in which we invest
Our consciousness, whispering softly
Of our selves undressed; and I wonder
Whether in our nakedness our talk
Would be of the repulsion, fear, disorder
Which for fifteen years she suffered
Almost unawares, until a need
New in her required that wrong
Resolved. And she would ask, wouldn’t she,
What I ought to ask myself, Why
Are you here? And would I
Even if I could, answer honestly?
A truth too often told will die
But it’s hard to say what went wrong
And however it happened, now it is
So much of what I am that I want
No resolution, no undoing of myself,
Content that the devious energies sprung
By this disorder have brought me here,
Dreaming, dark, ridiculous dreams.
But I could tell her
Things I hope she’d want to hear,
How long I’ve thought us of a kind
Finding that when we meet we are
Natural allies in a house of women
(Daughters all my children dear)
Glad to take on tasks together,
A bonfire, chopping wood, preferring
Something done to something said,
And rich in body and olive-skinned
The desire in me her beauty breeds,
And how her presence also makes
The woman in me breathe; and so
I wonder how all this would inform
Our being in bed. And though hard
To conceive, and thinking so harder still,
I recognize that my self upstanding stiff
Might not be for her a thing of wonder,
Not a prospect of her pleasure, rather
The unwanted symbol of what has ruptured
The right order of her being, and which
Lurking here in the darkness between us,
Now she has to make the instrument
Of hope. And so I would play the woman
To her man, tenderness our beginning,
My desire quiet and nothing urgent,
Waking and only working for her
As she dares to find herself in me,
Closer and closer until we risk
The long slow slide
Onto to me, into her.
V
A gentle snoring alongside calls me
Back to where I am, and I half think
To wake her, have her, wanting
Release from these damaging dreams.
But feeling me hard she would say
‘That’s not mine’, and have none of it;
So I nudge her to stop the snoring
And the night passes into morning
Brokenly. Breakfast comes at last
Where worn and foolish, I feel old
And she I think looks heavy, her body
Not quite in hand. Had this weariness
A secret and exciting cause, would we
Have resolved the disturbance in our souls,
Undone the damage in us? I don’t see how
Thus doing so much more, and doubting
We could make our brief moment of bliss
(A thing undeclared, unspoken of)
Domestic, endure the discords of time.
And yet wanting is wanting, and still
I want her. Soon afterwards we leave,
And as we part, she and I kiss politely.
