Coming into sight, you rest sleepy and smooth in your dish.
You are globed as a balloon and moist as honey.
Icy with pleasure it seems you have risen to a peak
of perfection, and begun to float so tender and pink,
your whole shape shimmying its delicate foam is not
merely a question of blond hair dressed high as satin
as you lean all of your weight on one hip, against a trellis
piped with tiny rosettes and stars; it is a question of hope.
Will we get a chance to see inside the scalloped skirt
wrapped round you dangled with marzipan sea-shells
fluted heart-shapes, wire baubles and hula hoops?
Will there be snow-dropped ice cream in the shape of tilted ships, large
bulbous domes, towers and spires, clear as a view from
Westminster Bridge? And now there are no cities so breathlessly
lit, no districts so red, no fields of desire so wide.
Has not laughter in the house spoken of it, has not every
chink widened in sympathy and whispered how she rides it
in secret, biting its ears, pressing it between her legs?
But what’s the use of sweating over this kind of thing
as if we were at the movies? Let’s have it for lunch.
