expelled from the garden of narrative
in the cruel no-man's-land between
insights intellectual and visceral
It wasn't really snow. It started
but soon stopped; by evening no trace remained.
And yet at noon it seemed no blasphemy
that some transcendent sense of fun
should now replay the mythical scene in which
a year before we had been flung together,
again in the first snowfall, and, of course,
in the same place. On the way, in the tram,
realisation dawned:
you had not been a state of grace, so that
with you I was more often happier,
but that every itsy-bitsy thing
to do with you had had that certain spark,
been full of meaning midst the attraction of
other particles, and life's warp and weft,
its splendid, ordered texture, gleaming far
beyond the grasp of mere geometry,
had then not only held me like a web
but also fitted close, as does a dress
that's made to measure, and when you were there
was shot with many a frisson.
Then, in the warmth of the Red Lion tea-room
(next day, no scene, merely a parody,
TV reported from precisely there:
a private battle-field, at sterile range)
- you were late as time unravelled,
we had to wait for a table, to submit
to other people's time - it was at last
clear that the animal greed, the sheer despair,
with which we'd tried to force agreement - while
maintaining each our interests - upon
everything that once we'd jointly held
in easy harmony, was by now
incapable of holding us together.
A hasty peck, we went our separate ways.
The evening pavement, bare again of snow,
lay dim in the chaos between two myths,
a dreary, cold expanse of vague extent.
Translated by Bernard Adams