summer lovin'

 

 

summer lovin'

 

I fell in love with Hélène -

two dizzy weeks in St Ives

that might have changed my life

 

Hélène dismissed our affair

as a holiday fling

between flirty strangers

 

we ate at the Sloop Inn -

sharing the seafood platter,

snuggling up on plush upholstery

drinking glasses of Billycan Chardonnay

 

staggering the sea front later

we stopped at a church poster,

 

‘somebody somewhere will die today

be grateful it's not you... dear reader!’

 

out of the blue that autumn

Hélène rang, ‘come for a visit,

I’ve something to tell you

- but not on the phone’

 

I stopped at a garage just outside Thame

to buy freesias wrapped in cellophane

 

after lunch at a pavement cafe

we took a grey drizzle boat trip

down the Isis to Iffley,

where Hélène told me,

 

‘I was pregnant but I’m not any more’

 

amid limp promises of friendship

we parted at Carfax,

 

Hélène did not look round

nor wave nor blow a kiss

 

nunc dimittis

 

Hélène set up home with Arvo,

an artist, Jewish, from Vilnius,

they squat a shoe-box studio

above a bistro in Gospel Oak,

and go about in paint-stained vests -

all oils, Picasso, and turpentine,

 

they feed on downstairs leftovers,

and ‘are very much in love’

 

Hélène paints delicate landscapes,

that Arvo smothers in broad brush rage

obscuring her detail - but leaving traces

 

it's said their oeuvre forms the basis

‘of a significant post-holocaust synthesis’

 

Arvo brawls with fellow illegals -

mostly Russians who claim to be Latvian -

 

he beats up Hélène now and again,

 

someone is dying today.