The Gambler

He lets women spin through his mind.
Blurred at first, the reel slows – a cherry,
a seven, then stops at Maria from the library.
As she lands on the mattress, her art books
spill: Rembrandt. Vermeer. With a couple
of nudges, Rubens: The Dutch Masters
pings on in neon above the head board;
Maria’s body emits an oven-fresh renaissance
glow, humming beneath her work gear.
(She has cracks too fine for the human eye
to see, or so they whisper at the issue
desk.) On the bed next to her an eyeball
becomes Britt Ekland’s body double,
who becomes his ex in a sports bag
before halting at the girl from the lido,
the one with the body he can’t imagine dry.
She appears in a two-piece, with a flush
of certificates. Finally, he flicks through
some of his male friends, those he thinks
more capable, more probable, before boldly
picking himself, materialising in the doorway,
naked, nothing if not perpendicular. Lazily,
he allows the bedroom to be the bedroom
he is actually in: sponge-print wall paint
and boxes of cassettes beneath the bed.
He edits out The Queen is Dead
and, in her place, has Prince’s Greatest Hits:
the wee man would approve – the sheets
are fresh, Egyptian silk, the air is softened
by low lying mist, a kind of Vaseline’d lens
but a touch more classy. And in the scene
that follows, there’s no logistics, no awkward
shifts of weight, just a series of flash cuts:
from one geometric shape to the next: apple,
horseshoe, bell, no stopping for the runner
to re-douse Girl Two with chlorinated water.
Maria adapts classical poses: she’s Leda,
he’s the Swan, they role-play the rape
of Leicippus’s daughters, pearl earrings
scatter, she lactates on demand, both still
and sparkling. Banana, pear, anvil.
They’re on the cash board, turrets strobing.
He starts to open and close his eyes,
the shuttered Hi/Lo between this world
and that, then the churn of his coinage
at last paying out. The cash on his chest.
The girls he left behind. He would
feed it back in, if he could.