Two Poems

Food of Love

Once I would eat breakfast following the
movement of blue buses or staining a book,
but food now is an aspect of our love.

We’ve turned it into emotion –
red pickle like the night’s heat, ice creams so
smooth they enforce silence, orange-
flavoured kisses, conversations directed by rum.

We’ve dignified it with memories – Mr. K’s
tender coconut soup like hot tears before
your going away, candy like sunlight
on the afternoon we lay in the park
in Kungsholmen, the apple wine we had
for breakfast last June, the duck you ate
with half your shirt buttons undone,
with a lantern and the sound of cicadas.

We’ve gathered its crisp, exact names –
gazpacho, cinzano, knäcke bröd.
Mozarella.

And it draws us into such a warm fraternity,
I wonder if there is anything like a solipsism
of taste.

What, for instance, does hing mean to your
saltandpepper brought up tongue,
how do lychees taste to you?

Shy

I remember the urgent knocking of the heart’s
small fist before a school elocution,
or running into a nun round a corner
and made idiot by that prim mouth,
those flawless skirts. There were
agonising deputations to the sitting room
at home to ask some muddy-booted,
cigarette-smelling visitor about tea.

Kids are no longer shy.
That quivering emotion belonged perhaps
to quiet bedrooms on winter afternoons
in near-forgotten, hill-encircled towns,
where children lisped tentative answers
to the questions of some slow matriarch,
and ate, anguished by undisguisable crunching,
the brittle butter biscuits from her tins.
That slow ordeal between the window’s lace
and the fire burning in the grate
was the established manner of being young.

To be shy now is odd or impolite: no one
expects it. There’s no longer the implication
of grace in being reserved. Yet doggedly,
I remain the girl once bent over a shirt
on Sunday: ironing alone through this
and other afternoons ill-defined by
the monsoon’s whimsical light.

It was only when coloured dream matched
the pressing to perfection of stiffened cuff
or pleated skirt, that I possessed all the
logic, all the beauty in the world.