Trust

It was a strange feeling:
standing naked for him,
frozen in that state of change,
the distance and the silence
breached only
by a desire to please.


(For F.)


4 July 1984
 
 

This is the last of the poems for F. The first was ‘Shells’ (#551) written on 26 July 1983 and so what I have here is a record for that first year. It’s an odd record because it only dwells in the holes where we used to hide. There’s no record of the public me or what was going on at home with my parents, with my wife and daughter, with work and with my studies. None of that existed. Only desire existed. It was a strange year. It was an intoxicating year. It was a frustrating year.

On Friday Carrie and I watched the recent BBC adaptation of The Go Between and although F. and me didn’t have a wee boy passing notes between us—thank you Alexander Graham Bell—the situation wasn’t that different. Looking back now I’m frankly embarrassed by our desperation. I didn’t post ‘From a Distance’ (#561) but it’s a record of the day F. caught the train with one of her sisters and I stood on top of the multi-storey car park watching for them so I could drive by the station as she was going in hoping she might glimpse me which, as it happens, she didn’t.

In four and a half years the first poem for B. will appear.