Rendezvous: A Poem

1. In Bleeding Heart Yard

I cannot see you, touch you, cannot feel
You in my embrace – myself in yours –
The warmth, the flow and firmness
Of your body, nor now the form and
Pressure of your lips in so profound
A kiss, yet all this and more of you lives
In me: a more beyond your physicality,
That has no fixing in memory – intense,
Continuing, as this is – that exists in no space,
In nothing of the familiar bistro, the place
We chose to meet, with its umbrellas
On the cobbles of Bleeding Heart Yard –
But lives in roots beneath we two, in what
Is insubstantial yet of every material
Consequence: a place where life itself
Comes into being and renews all that is
As we embrace and hold it in the combined
And combining fact and mystery of love.

2. On Leather Lane

We took a small round table here, for coffee
After lunch, and it was not a thing between us –
Though centred for our chairs – but a surface
On which we placed statements of ourselves,
And of feeling for each other, as our cups
Onto their saucers, and reached across
The no distance towards where the other sat
To pick these up in fingers of willingness
And acceptance, bringing them still closer
To ourselves, to where we could drink them in.
You said – do you remember? – that I had
The character for you of your guardian angel:
It is a presence that is no presence, and yet
Exists in a setting in which we remain together,
As at the side of the market, its buying and selling,
Where there are no tables, chairs, traders calling
Out their wares, but is a place that depends
On knowing and resting in the reality of love.

3. By Farringdon Station

We held hands down Greville Street, and you
Held mine tight as far as the crossing to the tube
At Farringdon where we said goodbye, and
I held you there, felt the press, the wholeness
Of your body, of you as a discovered certainty,
In a stillness through the changing of the lights –
The coming and going of the stream of people
Momentarily at the kerb with us, but with
Somewhere else to be – and all desire, all will,
Was to stay the time and place – hold them
In our immobility – and become and be
In that absence from locality, no longer others,
But one in thinking, physicality, emotion,
And we were this: you and I were as close as
Bodies, feeling, thought, place and time allow
And the words rose in me and in you that
Said one to another we would always be
There at the crossing, and always here in love.

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