FACT OF THE ACT

On the other side of the world’s narrow lane

You lie in bed, your young breasts tingling

With imagined kisses, your lips puckered,

Your fists tight.

Dreaming yourself naked in my arms,

Free from discovery, under some holm oak;

The high sun peering through thick branches,

All winds mute.

Endlessly you prolong the moment

Of your delirium: a first engagement,

Silent, inevitable, fearful,

Honey-sweet.

Will it be so in fact? Will fact mirror

Your virginal ecstasies:

True love, uncircumstantial,

No blame, no shame?

It is for you, now, to say ‘come’;

It is for you, now, to prepare the bed;

It is for you as the sole hostess

Of your white dreams –

It is for you to open the locked gate,

It is for you to shake red apples down,

It is for you to halve them with your hands

That both may eat.

Yet expectation lies as far from fact

As fact’s own after-glow in memory;

Fact is a dark return to man’s beginnings,

Test of our hardihood, test of a wilful

And blind acceptance of each other

As also flesh.

[From Poems 1965–1968 (1968)]