If love is the answer, what is the question?
If love is the question, what is the answer?
'Like playing tennis with the net down.'
–Robert Frost
Just as you raise high your racket
the baseline creeps away from you.
Unsettled, you shuffle and serve
but your judgment is shaken
and your partner responds with ease.
Love fifteen.
The tramlines, no longer parallel,
misalign the opposite court
and anyway start to fade.
There's no chance of knowing
if you're pitching it right.
Love thirty.
The net disappears. There's nothing
between the two of you
but space and a sense
that you're playing a game
in which scores are being kept.
Love forty.
No umpire, no line judges,
no calls if you foot fault,
until it's too late.
No court is set out
and you are no match for this
Game.
A woman I know who's quite sporty
Said, 'At my age I ought to be naughty.'
Her tennis game wavered
When the coach that she favoured
Cried, 'Let's keep the score at love-forty.'
A dozen red roses are wedged in the letterbox,
Wrapped in clear cellophane, simple and neat.
Soon she'll come home after work. In the twilight
She'll see the bouquet as she enters the street.
Maybe a note has been pushed through the letter box:
'I'm sorry. Forgive me. It's all a mistake.'
But the first thing she'll see is the dozen red roses.
And the roses don't know how much may be at stake.
A dozen may be cheaper
eleven makes a team
Ten to one are good odds
and nine lives get the cream
Eight bells chime at midnight
Seven samurai save the land
Six eggs in a carton
Five fingers on a hand
Four corners mark the world's edge
Three winds will fly a kite
Two can learn to tango
but one can start a fight
He tentatively turns the tap
and pauses staring, thoughtless,
before fitting the plug in the sink.
A thin drizzle of Fairy Liquid
drops from an unsqueezed bottle.
He carefully places two plates,
two knives, two forks and
two wine glasses in the water,
brushes a mop across a plate,
which he places face down to drain.
He lifts the other plate
and makes it fly from his soapy hand
towards the door through which she left.
And a glass.
And another.
He fetches the dustpan
and brushes the shards into a plastic bag.
Pyjama'd in the morning, the children
will at least not cut their feet.
The day you rang to say
'And by the way I won’t be back
any more'
there was no more pain
any more than usual
no more emptiness
any more than usual
no more waiting for you
not to come to bed
any more
If there had been
any more of a change
I might have smiled
and let heart-shaped
red balloons float away
across the sun.
Talk on the phone ought to be easier,
With none of the distracting, confusing
Signals from body language in the mix.
Yet dealing with the words and tone of voice
Is quite enough, the unseen face replaced
As eyes scan round the room, become transfixed
By objects once shared. The change must be faced:
The words and tone of voice are separate
The words unheard but not unheard, the bone
That loses when two dogs fight. Losing
Control must follow. Make the wiser choice.
Hang up. Ignore the bullying ring tone.
Can we talk together?
Perhaps walk by the sea
and later, who knows,
we may enjoy pillow talk.
Can we talk it over?
We seem to be suited
and later, who knows,
we might talk to our children.
Can we talk it through?
We seem to be at odds
and later, who knows,
we might talk the same language.
Can we talk no more
except through solicitors?
And later, who knows,
We may never speak to each other again.
You had a walk-on part in my life.
It was me you walked on.
I always wished I could relate
To those who say it's not too late
To change your life, to seize your fate
To nibble boldly at the bait.
Well, I for one at any rate
Hope one day I shall find a mate
Because, I tell you, I would hate
To end up in the single state.
So please be kind enough to wait
While I scratch out my sell-by date.
I still sleep on the same side of the bed.
I don't encroach on empty space
but one or other of the cats will come
and settle—usually before the book
is closed, the light switched off and I
turn on my side to face the cooler half.
In the Science Museum tea-room
we dissected relationships,
half-heartedly clinical,
the benefit of middle-age hindsight
assembled as patchy evidence
falling short of a theory
of failed or troubled marriage.
The mighty engines close at hand,
once the heart of solid constancy,
mocked our waywardness.
But their regulators hung limp
above the turbines, no longer
cock-sure of their ability
to set the pace, to smooth
the turbulence of generated power.
She was a librarian, so
we did everything by the book.
We met in nineteen eighty four.
For a while she was my Brighton rock.
At first we were like other couples
enjoying our brave new world.
But I went to stay in her bleak house
next to the waste land by the aerodrome.
I suffered from lost illusions
in that Alice-in-wonderland world.
Don't tell me the truth about love:
It was love in the asylum.
We alternated war and peace which left me
in the heart of darkness, a dangling man.
In the trial she put me through
I could never connect my crime and punishment.
I sank to wuthering depths
as the all too visible man.
I'd have preferred the road not taken
and to sing again those songs of innocence.
But this is not the age of innocence,
or common sense, not this side of paradise.
I needed no persuasion
to return my outstanding loans,
to tear up my library card
and watch television instead.
I still wonder what I met her for.
Thanks to George Orwell, Graham Greene, John Updike, Aldous Huxley, Charles Dickens, T S Eliot, Rex Warner, Honoré de Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas, W H Auden, Leo Tolstoy, Joseph Conrad, Saul Bellow, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Emily Bronte, H G Wells, Robert Frost, William Blake, Edith Wharton, Tom Paine, F Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen
Love song of the aging new man
And I would clean for you, my love,
and run the Dyson over carpets every day,
pour lime-scale solvent round the base of taps
and burnish chrome, so you could see your sleepy face.
And I would cook for you, my love,
not Tesco ready meals but freshly bought
ingredients combined in cunning ways
to stimulate your taste buds and your eye.
And I would wash for you, my love,
and separate the whites from coloureds, set
the cycle, shake out creases, hang to dry
in gentle breezes, even iron your smalls.
And I would play for you, my love,
the music and the DVDs you like,
suppressing my own preference
for arty films, Bing Crosby, western swing.
And I shall wait for you, my love,
and wait perhaps until the day I die.
If you exist, the least I can expect
is you'll be pretty nearly perfect too.
© David Fisher 1962-2019