MRS PROTHEROE

MRS PROTHEROE

The Night Your Landlady Came To Your Room

by Robert Davidson

A loose gown in which her flesh swam free
Fascinated
Your eyes resting diffidently, the full white breasts
The shadowed cleft
Your mind searching the unknown
Hesitated, resisted
Locked within the closed circle of yourself.

Broken into tears
She moaned your name against your mouth
Said her old man had deserted the year before. You saw
Silver tears sliding down the sad moonlit face.

She said you were too withdrawn within yourself =
You kept to your room, too much alone, she said. And so lost
Lying on your bed, reading Schopenhauer late at night
You were reading everything yet could believe in nothing, you said.

She clinging to you with her mouth
Arousing. Inflaming flesh. You losing the will to resist
You would solve the mystery of yourself, you thought
As your bodies took the shapes of passion
You would come out of yourself in this long waited moment.

She searching your boy's body for the lost images of youth
The skin stretching transparently on your ribs
She making a moaning, loving sound
While taking the taste of you with her tongue -
And you holding tightly the muscles of her plump white thighs
As interlocked her body became as one with yours.

When you opened your eyes
Your room. your books still preserved their apparent shapes
Despite long shadows in pools of early morning light
She was as a rock to which we cling, you thought
She was the rock of love
On which we all have founded, you further thought.

And as you wandered deeper into yourself, no longer lost
You felt you'd slithered down a solid slope. sensible
Of a dream-time womb in smooth transparent skin
While she lay prone and spent on you -
And for a moment you felt as wise as God.

Love? - an equation for two bodies -
Or the subtler colloquy of disparate souls?