The Breakfast

That day, I filled the house with fruit,

with strawberries that shame the root –

their red hearts filled to bursting – and

with grapes, each one a swollen gland;

with melons pumped to ripeness, with

the peaches that are grown in myth

(plump and downy, blusher tints),

with mango, guava, quumquat, quince;

with food for love to breakfast on,

the juice-filled flesh, the skins that shone

like health; the tones of still-lifes by

some Dutch or Spanish master. I

heaped up this little Golden Age

for you to wake to, built a stage

on which we’d act our amorous parts

with strawberries, those redder hearts,

with melons, those fantastic breasts,

with grapes, and mangoes and the rest;

you’d nibble cherries, bedhead-hung,

while I feasted with my tongue;

a couple from Fellini’s kitsch

Satyricon, the bedroom rich

in sunlit colours and the scents

of fruits – and roses, deep, intense,

a crimson, velvet-petalled bunch…

fruit would be our breakfast; lunch

would be more fruit, washed down with wine;

and we’d so twist and intertwine

the bedroom would become a bower

and every passing sunlit hour

spent there, a bacchanal, baroque

and bronzed, a scene from vieux Maroc.

But in the restaurant that night

we quarrelled. Loss of appetite

drove our maddened voices on,

drink lent them venom. Gone

in a blazing instant, chair upturned,

you looked back once, and that look burned

its way into me – hot green knife,

lasering the source of life…

I moped my way back to the house

and all the time played cat-and-mouse

with my own thoughts. The stairs. The door.

And something touched the open sore

my mind had now become – the fruit!

The bowls of it, the senseless, brute

new fact that it would go to waste

with you not here, to eat, to taste!

I couldn’t stand to see it plain,

to see each black grape ooze and stain

the room with accusation, each

pineapple, quumquat, plum and peach

grow overripe and rot. What use

those bleeding hearts, when all their juice

would pour itself out over no one’s

mouth, what use those glowing suns

of mangoes, when there was no skin

to see their glow reflected in?

No more could I have thrown away

the feast I’d planned for us all day –

a pointless end, unplanned, unsought –

than I could cauterize my thought

of what a desert I had sown

in all that plenty… So, alone

in Barcelona for a week

I prowled the barrio gotíc

where you had lived two lonely years

and shed my solitary tears

in streets so full of you, I felt

your presence everywhere, and smelt

in every vaulted tapas bar

the strange amalgam that you are –

the sweet, the pungent and the salt.

Was I, I ask you now, at fault

to hear in the cathedral’s hush

your whispered Yes, to see your flush

spreading as I stroked you? Was

I far beyond the pale because

I wanted you so much, I’d pause

before Picasso’s minotaurs,

their bollocks taut, their massive cocks

like keys unlocking all the locks

in gaping, thick-thighed girls, and stare

as if I saw you lying there,

welcoming the hot intrusion?

If I saw, in my confusion,

Dalí’s elongated globes

of female flesh, from arse to lobes,

as versions of the parts I missed,

distorted by the onanist’s

grim fantasy – by mine as well,

since I was in a wanker’s hell –

grotesquely stretched, like space, like time

itself, tormented by this crime

against love’s natural law? No end

to long white nights without a friend…

And so I left for Paris, where

we’d clasped hands in the freezing air

and sat like breathing statues in

the Luxembourg, and watched the skin

grow darker on our café-crèmes

among the butches and the femmes

in Le Select, and gorged on love

and all the arty gossip of

the lunchtime ghosts in La Coupole;

but this time I could not be whole

or hungry, and each night I’d wake

and feel a sharp familiar ache

to have you there before I died –

to turn you over, slip inside

and fuck you, half-asleep; to feel

you feeding on me, while my meal

was what I savoured from behind,

the flesh, the pulp, the juice, the rind –

before I died one flophouse night,

oozing sour sweat, drink and fright,

staring into darkness, raw

and red-eyed, hating what I saw;

alone with shapes made by my shame

in pillows where I groaned your name.

By day the galleries I’d haunt –

shambling, spectral, shy and gaunt,

myself another kind of ghost –

showed me what I needed most;

Matisse’s houris, Bonnard’s Marthe

who glowed serenely in her bath

and, most of all, great Rodin’s nudes –

the woman, real in all her moods

and manias, her ancient power

and beauty, offered for an hour,

a lifetime, to those lucky men

she chooses, then claimed back again

to please herself alone, her friends…

But none of these could make amends

for what I’d lost, or thrown away,

while Baudelaire and Hemingway,

Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein

all whispered of what had been mine.

Their voices told at every turn

the home truth that I had to learn:

I’d lost the thread, the plot, the way,

my luxe, my calme, my volupté;

I’d lost the object of my gaze,

the magnet of my night, my days.

And Paris was, by day, by night

a monument to appetite,

to everything we crave, from sex

to food from art to discothèques;

market-streets where stalls spilled fruit

in front of strollers; here, en route

from bar to adult cinema,

a woman splayed across a car;

there, to advertise a watch,

a pouting face, a pouting crotch;

shop windows stuffed with bras and pants

(the simulacra of romance),

with toys and leather, whips and creams

to smooth the passage of our dreams…

The films I watched dug deep in dirt,

I’d sit transfixed and tug and spurt

and sob to think I’d come so low

How could I stay? How could I go

back home to what was waiting there,

the sweet corruption, foetid air,

the poisoned, seeping world I’d made?

I festered, shivering, afraid –

not of blackened fruit, not mould,

but the blacker tale they told:

of stupid anger, mindless haste,

of happiness that goes to waste.

I took the London train, to find

the fruit was mush, and mush my mind;

one thought wormed its way out: to mend

what I had broken, make an end

of breakfasts without you. Sit, eat

with me these first-fruits, bittersweet.

-- Alan Jenkins