Roses in a water glass – that’s twice
You’ve bought me roses: first for my birthday,
Then because I missed you while you were away –
Now a memory of sugar, spice
And all things petalled, fragrant, cupped and complex:
Were you aware they’d speak to me of sex?
A week later: this time in crumpled foil
A nosegay: geum, wallflower, philadelphus
And something yellow and, we admitted, anonymous
(‘To say,’ you said, ‘thank you for the phone call.’ –
the words I left that were the first spoken
between us since that morning when I’d woken
alone and smelled you on me); white, yellow and red
over the leaves and the mug painted blue on white
with delphiniums, and beside it the crumpled horn of bright
light aluminium, empty as ‘til Wednesday night my bed,
redolent with promises. It lay on my desk touching
with its open end the posy’s shadow, as if debouching
from it were the gift, continuously, like a dream
of modest cornucopia, as becomes us with our clever
balancing of desire and experience: all we ever
wanted, now, perhaps? Yielding a seam
of metaphor that I have been wanting for days
to tell you beyond, to make windows for you, the ways
I would not have us mistake. Let us take it as a toy’s
Wrapping a birthday child who confuses
Figure and ground – as they must to learn – and uses
(or depending on the innocent girl’s or boy’s
benefactor’s point of view, abuses) the magnetic cover
for the lodestone. So, we may suppose, might a lover
innocently mislead or be misled by the form
of her or his declarations, particularly if she or he
might happen by profession or protestation to be
a poet with a facility for or instinctively warm
towards love-songs, or wanting the nous or the knack
to distinguish subject and song, or one-track
as some of us are and all of us are sometime,
forked things. What I am trying to say is this:
we must at all times beware of the ability of the kiss
to deceive, and the propensity to infatuation of rhyme,
false as the horn of plenty. Dear –
there, I’ve said it. And now I’ve got myself clear
we can consider – do you share my relief? –
that other symbolism, the carnal Dionysiac,
the me underneath you naked on my back,
instead of the modified though necessary sheaf.
In that language cornucopia is a four letter
Word for that part of your anatomy I thought better
Not to name in my encomium of you (though apposite
And original descriptors did, to be honest, evade
Me and perhaps that’s why) when we first made
What’s called, in the interesting situation we despite
Your initial reluctance were in, love; for that little thing
Of which – astonishingly – poets rarely sing.
The point is to not confuse the horn with the plenty,
The container with the content, the seductress
With the seduction, the conducive with the conductress
As if we were still obtuse, arrogant and twenty,
Peremptorily using where we should have pleased,
Concerned only with having our needs eased,
More selfish than our genes. Of course, that’s all
Changed and – for now? For ever? – the best
We can attempt or commit to is that enlightened self-interest
Which demands honesty, attention to detail
In all things – yes: Wednesday – and taking good
Care to establish that neither is misunderstood.
So I will cherish both the flowers and the foil;
The ones for their profusion, their astonishing variety
In such a small space, their perfume and their beauty
Knowing that when as they must they unpetal and spoil
There will remain the aluminium metaphor to hold
Memory, meaning and – though it glitters – gold;
For who like us can say
(whatever might be the possible price:
which deity may not demand human sacrifice
however placated?) that we first went to bed in May,
and when we stopped making love – too soon;
there were engagements – it was early June?