Consummation

It was months before it happened.
There were stumbling dress rehearsals,
vague, uncharted fumblings
when his lips embarked on brief, unfinished business,
or drink diminished
his responsibility
and pricked faint animal stirrings
through his jeans.
Mostly, I made do
with second helpings of fantasy,
sprawled on my single bed
in sin and a skimpy nightie
and having him thrust and thrust
till I was too sore
for even a finger.
He was probably in Clapham
at the time,
haggling for saucepans
in Arding and Hobbs' spring sale.
No matter,
Clapham to climax
is a brief journey
if you close your eyes,
and mine were permanently closed
(and everything else open)
for months after we met.

It was more months
before he noticed.
He was still rattling on
about Jungian realignment
and the Object Relations Theory of
Melanie Klein.

Jung was lying on his back
and Klein kyboshed,
when he first made a tentative move.
It was mid-March, I recall,
with strikes on the tube and riots
in Nepal, and a Brixton boy
had been mugged and left for dead.
"I want you," I said.
I was so used
to his never replying
that I more or less
addressed my remarks
to the wallpaper,
but he suddenly got up
and grabbed my wrists
hard, and gave me a kiss
as calmly as if it were
a cup of tea,
and the cup scalded.
I almost choked,
trying to murmur
"Now, oh please now"
through the gag of his tongue,
and the world turned a slow
unbearable somersault
and he didn't answer,
but his lips were touchwood
against my kindled breasts.
The ceiling had never looked
more beautiful.
I had always feared the reality,
after the thrusting lust of
over-inflated fantasising,
but his slow hands were mesmerising
and his fast tongue was a snake,
a cork,
a chameleon.

He hated interruptions.
"Go away!" he griped
when rain sniped at the window
or the voyeur moon stared in.
And his own sun came up
and scorched me,
and I lay like wax,
taking any impression
he cared to make       

Later, a thousand suns later,
with the gas-fire grinning
and the kettle out-singing the rain,
he pulled on his jumble-sale jersey
and buckled his belt again,
then calmly made tea, as if to pretend
that nothing had actually happened
and all we were doing
was this tiny, intimate business of
boiling and brewing.

"Thank you," I mumbled,
draining my cup
and fumbling in my bag for
a goodbye.
Outside, only sky
and a non-existent rail-replacement bus.
I stood, sipping rain,
raw with guilt, and shame,
yet begging time to hasten, hurtle by,
till the day he might make tea
for us again.