Trans. Ben Jonson
The Marriage of Consonant and Vowel
Adam Horovitz
i
After the Wedding
Dreamt of you again last night,
your smiling face pushed close to mine;
caught between mirrors, a squeezebox
of repeats cluttering the line.
I thought as we were twitter-pressed
like sausage meat inside new skins
how little’s known of what we love
hate and how compression bins
our excess dreams and sears off
the vowels of love; the consonants
of hurt are all that’s left intact.
How does a lover thrive? Expanse!
No questing after jagged and reductive fact
but after puffball spores and seedlings of romance.
ii
The Bride Has Taken the Vwls & Lft th Bldng
Drmt f y gn lst nt
yr :) pshd cls 2 mn;
cght btwn mrrrs, sqzbx
f rpts clttrng th ln.
Thght s w wr twttr-prssd
lke ssg mt nsd nw skns
hw lttl’s knwn f wht w ♥
ht & hw cmprssn bns
r xs drms & srs ff
th vwls f ♥; th cnsnnts
f hrt r ll tht’s lft ntct.
Hw ds lvr thrv? Xpns!
Nt qstng ftr jggd & rdctv fct
bt ftr pffbll sprs & sdlngs f rmnc.
iii
The Bride in Her Lover’s Bed
ea o ou aai a i,
ou ii ae ue oe o ie;
au eee io a ueeeo
o eea uei e ie.
i ou a e ee ie-ee
ie auae ea iie e i
o ie o o a e oe
ae a o oeio i
ou ee ea a ea o
e oe o oe e ooa
o u ae a a e ia.
o oe a oe ie? Eae!
o uei ae ae a euie a
u ae ua oe a eei o oae.
In Defence of Adultery
Julia Copus
We don’t fall in love: it rises through us
the way that certain music does –
whether a symphony or ballad –
and it is sepia-coloured,
like spilt tea that inches up
the tiny tube-like gaps inside
a cube of sugar lying by a cup.
Yes, love’s like that: just when we least
needed or expected it
a part of us dips into it
by chance or mishap and it seeps
through our capillaries, it clings
inside the chambers of the heart.
We’re victims, we say: mere vessels,
drinking the vanilla scent
of this one’s skin, the lustre
of another’s eyes so skilfully
darkened with bistre. And whatever
damage might result we’re not
to blame for it: love is an autocrat
and won’t be disobeyed.
Sometimes we manage
to convince ourselves of that.
Office Friendships
Gavin Ewart
Eve is madly in love with Hugh
And Hugh is keen on Jim.
Charles is in love with very few
And few are in love with him.
Myra sits typing notes of love
With romantic pianist’s fingers.
Dick turns his eyes to the heavens above
Where Fran’s divine perfume lingers.
Nicky is rolling eyes and tits
And flaunting her wiggly walk.
Everybody is thrilled to bits
By Clive’s suggestive talk.
Sex suppressed will go berserk,
But it keeps us all alive.
It’s a wonderful change from wives and work
And it ends at half past five.
Her News
Hugo Williams
on the other end of the line.
I pictured your expression,
one eye screwed shut against the smoke
as you waited for my reaction.
I was waiting for it myself, a list of my own news
gone suddenly cold in my hand.
Supposing my wife found out, what would happen then?
Would I have to leave her and marry you now?
Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad,
starting again with someone new, finding a new place,
pretending the best was yet to come.
It might even be fun,
playing the family man, walking around in the park
full of righteous indignation.
But no, I couldn’t go through all that again,
not without my own wife being there,
not without her getting cross about everything.
Perhaps she wouldn’t mind about the baby,
then we could buy a house in the country
and all move in together.
That sounded like a better idea.
Now that I’d been caught at last, a wave of relief
swept over me. I was just considering
a shed in the garden with a radio and a day bed,
when I remembered I hadn’t seen you for over a year.
‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘When’s it due?’
Story of a Hotel Room
Rosemary Tonks
Thinking we were safe – insanity!
We went in to make love. All the same
Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom
Then in the gloom …
… And who does not know that pair of shutters
With the awkward hook on them
All screeching whispers? Very well then, in the gloom
We set about acquiring one another
Urgently! But on a temporary basis
Only as guests – just guests of one another’s senses.
But idiots to feel so safe you hold back nothing
Because the bed of cold, electric linen
Happens to be illicit …
To make love as well as that is ruinous.
Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us
That without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection –
If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,
The concurring deep love of the heart
Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.
may i feel
e. e. cummings
may i feel said he
(i’ll squeal said she
just once said he)
it’s fun said she
(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she
(let’s go said he
not too far said she
what’s too far said he
where you are said she)
may i stay said he
(which way said she
like this said he
if you kiss said she
may i move said he
is it love said she)
if you’re willing said he
(but you’re killing said she
but it’s life said he
but your wife said she
now said he)
ow said she
(tiptop said he
don’t stop said she
oh no said he)
go slow said she
(cccome? said he
ummm said she)
you’re divine! said he
(you are Mine said she)
Adultery
Carol Ann Duffy
Wear dark glasses in the rain.
Regard what was unhurt
as though through a bruise.
Guilt. A sick, green tint.
New gloves, money tucked in the palms,
the handshake crackl
es. Hands
can do many things. Phone.
Open the wine. Wash themselves. Now
you are naked under your clothes all day,
slim with deceit. Only the once
brings you alone to your knees,
miming, more, more, older and sadder,
creative. Suck a lie with a hole in it
on the way home from a lethal, thrilling night
up against a wall, faster. Language
unpeels a lost cry. You’re a bastard.
Do it do it do it. Sweet darkness
in the afternoon; a voice in your ear
telling you how you are wanted,
which way, now. A telltale clock
wiping the hours from its face, your face
on a white sheet, gasping, radiant, yes.
Pay for it in cash, fiction, cab-fares back
to the life which crumbles like a wedding-cake.
Paranoia for lunch; too much
to drink, as a hand on your thigh
tilts the restaurant. You know all about love,
don’t you. Turn on your beautiful eyes
for a stranger who’s dynamite in bed, again
and again; a slow replay in the kitchen
where the slicing of innocent onions
scalds you to tears. Then, selfish autobiographical sleep
in a marital bed, the tarnished spoon of your body
stirring betrayal, your heart over-ripe at the core.
You’re an expert, darling; your flowers
dumb and explicit on nobody’s birthday.
So write the script – illness and debt,
a ring thrown away in a garden
no moon can heal, your own words
commuting to bile in your mouth, terror –
and all for the same thing twice. And all
for the same thing twice. You did it.
What. Didn’t you. Fuck. Fuck. No. That was
the wrong verb. This is only an abstract noun.
The Dark Night of the Sole
Kit Wright
‘My husband’s an odd fish,’ she said.
A casual remark
And yet it lingered in my head
And later, when we went to bed,
It woke me in the dark.
My husband’s an odd fish. I lay
Uneasy. On the ceiling
Raw lorry lights strobe-lit the grey
Glimmer of dawn. Sleepless dismay
Revolved upon the feeling
Of something wrong in what I’d heard,
Some deep, unhappy thing,
Some odder fact her statement blurred.
And then a prickling horror stirred
Within me as the wing
Of madness brushed. I recognized
The real thing strange to be
Not dorsal structure (fins disguised)
Nor travel habits (route revised:
A Day Return to sea)
But that he was a fish at all!
Trembling, I left the bed
Dressed quickly, tiptoed through the hall,
Edged past him, gaping from his stall
Of oval water, fled
To where I sit and write these lines,
Sweating. I saw and heard
Strange things last night. Cold guilt defines
The moral: learn to read the signs –
She was an odd, odd bird.
‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame’
William Shakespeare
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action: and till action, lust
Is perjur’d, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, – and prov’d, a very woe;
Before, a joy propos’d; behind a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Cyber Infidelity
Jane Holland
Beautiful lover, still beautiful
because unseen, as far apart
as two incalculable griefs
on either side of a war, cast
the broken parts of yourself
over the bridge that separates us –
no less incomprehensible
than history back into the void
where a limp, or squint, halitosis,
puckered rolls of flesh, a voice
abrupt as a bedspring, can be shed
for this dazzling dive naked
into a fast-as-light vernacular,
cunnilingus of the internet,
fellatio of different parts
of speech – delete, delete, amend –
while the caches of the fluttering ghosts
of our other halves, asleep in bed,
send silent cookies to the heart:
bedtime now, put out the light.
To His Lost Lover
Simon Armitage
Now they are no longer
any trouble to each other
he can turn things over, get down to that list
of things that never happened, all of the lost
unfinishable business.
For instance … for instance,
how he never clipped and kept her hair, or drew a hairbrush
through that style of hers, and never knew how not to blush
at the fall of her name in close company.
How they never slept like buried cutlery –
two spoons or forks cupped perfectly together,
or made the most of some heavy weather –
walked out into hard rain under sheet lightning,
or did the gears while the other was driving.
How he never raised his fingertips
to stop the segments of her lips
from breaking the news,
or tasted the fruit
or picked for himself the pear of her heart,
or lifted her hand to where his own heart
was a small, dark, terrified bird
in her grip. Where it hurt.
Or said the right thing,
or put it in writing.
And never fled the black mile back to his house
before midnight, or coaxed another button of her blouse,
then another,
or knew her
favourite colour,
her taste, her flavour,
and never ran a bath or held a towel for her,
or soft-soaped her, or whipped her hair
into an ice-cream cornet or a beehive
of lather, or acted out of turn, or misbehaved
when he might have, or worked a comb
where no comb had been, or walked back home
through a black mile hugging a punctured heart,
where it hurt, where it hurt, or helped her hand
to his butterfly heart
in its two blue halves.
And never almost cried,
and never once described
an attack of the heart,
or under a silk shirt
nursed in his hand her breast,
her left, like a tear of flesh
wept by the heart,
where it hurts,
or brushed with his thumb the nut of her nipple,
or drank intoxicating liquors from her navel.
Or christened the Pole Star in her name,
or shielded the mask of her face like a flame,
a pilot light,
or stayed the night,
or steered her back to that house of his,
or said ‘Don
’t ask me how it is
I like you.
I just might do.’
How he never figured out a fireproof plan,
or unravelled her hand, as if her hand
were a solid ball
of silver foil
and discovered a lifeline hiding inside it,
and measured the trace of his own alongside it.
But said some things and never meant them –
sweet nothings anybody could have mentioned.
And left unsaid some things he should have spoken,
about the heart, where it hurt exactly, and how often.
Ending
Gavin Ewart
The love we thought would never stop
now cools like a congealing chop.
The kisses that were hot as curry
are bird-pecks taken in a hurry.
The hands that held electric charges
now lie inert as four moored barges.
The feet that ran to meet a date
are running slow and running late.
The eyes that shone and seldom shut
are victims of a power cut.
The parts that then transmitted joy
are now reserved and cold and coy.
Romance, expected once to stay,
has left a note saying GONE AWAY.
Rubbish at Adultery