Love poems - sooner or later, così fan tutti.
     

TO TONY’S GIRL

     Konferenz der Fachgermanistik, Tokyo

Your profile against
the lecture crowd, your
face sensed
with no lipstick or powder,
simply as beauty in blossom
through the fog of German
concepts, gossamer
amid the not quite human
powertalkers - you make
him shut his eyes on
you, feel sere and hoary, shake
with lust, lose his horizon.

He meant to dine alone. No,
everything is you. The napery’s
your skin, moon shadows
are your hands, your mystery
is the glass of wine
in which he sees his
heart drown. The kind
waitress plucks it out, squeezes
it dry on the napkin;
he sighs, Heart,
                     you’re drunk again!

      1998
     

SPOTLIT

Spotlit you see it from above.
     He edges out to strut his wares:
     You are lovely, he declares,
his hand aloft like a white dove
and his air formal / easy like a white glove.
     How well is it performed?
     The worn bits made alive, or just rewarmed?
A plot you might like more of
or one to get the shove?
     It’s - quite nice. Variety
           enough to sustain the show
           till curtain, and you go,
     a little moved - you never leave scot-free
re-watching old tales of love.

      1999
     

The next one had a somewhat oblique appearance in Pffa, as one of the examples in the long opening post of my thread Syllabics (July 04) in Voyage of Discovery (now in Blurbs).
     

KATHRYN

I’d been re-reading his old poems
when he travelled with Kathryn,

verses still fresh as a fine tea with
unaccustomed happiness.

I wanted him to love her again,
surrender all his distance.

I’ve left the past on the page, he said.
There’s no distance on the page.

When his wife came smiling with the tray
she found us oddly silent.

      2002
     

This was posted in Pffa in Love.
     

REPLAY

Since whisky and stories tend to the best with age,
I’ll sip and listen in my big armchair
as the murmuring night reads from the scratched page
the cleaned-up narration of our affair.

The characters? Gorgeous and warm, strong on all sides!
The plot? Triumph and loss and lesson and amending!
And an eternal theme - things change but love abides!
Perfect! Except for the ending.

      2003