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Sport 31: Spring 2003
Cynics need not attend
Cynics need not attend
How everything begins with chocolates in the movies,
the fingered paper that drives lone viewers to rage!
She has sat through so many chocolates and that rustle
of first times, he has laid out a small fortune
buying such earnests of sweet intent, decade
after decade. ‘I was fornicating with a woman
in the 4 Square in Ngaio,’ he might well put it,
but of course does not, ‘between cartons of basmati rice,
below shelves of Italian peeled tomatoes,
while you, my love, were walking towards me,
I think of you walking towards me like a girl
holding a branch on a Greek vase, as delicate,
as remote, as that, I like to think
of the branches stirring with the newest spring.’
How romance is a word that washes whitest, go along
with that? And we don't knock it, do we, say ‘Lay off’
to dazzle. ‘I was going it too,’ she might reasonably
answer, ‘regular as clockwork with a rep in the office
who liked nothing more than talking to his wife
on the phone across my shoulder as climax whooshed close
as all that, frisson wasn't in it!’ If you think of
love as a queue, First in first served a banner
of sorts across the Great Turnstyle, then suppose
one queue goes this way and one another,
tail-enders at the stadium's far side—
only we don't, do we, choose to put it so?
They are in the movies again for the first
and only time, her fingers tamp at the soft
centres hoping the one he took wasn't
the crème caramel she fancies. The adventures
that start from here, with her saying, breathy,
‘We can go halves if you like,’ the chocolate
a cigar butt as she turns towards him, Nice!
How love unwraps and wraps with that rustle of paper!