The Sea King

On the big day he said, 'Her excellence

yields to the discerning eye.'

So, who could expect much on the

wedding night?

Who could expect much of his cool pastures,

his sallow buttocks (spied juddering

from a luke-warm tub)?

She let herself have what there was of him.

The Revolution came as a relief - in the

village somebody said the Palace was

happily stormed, and now there was

a scuffle going on.

It was no time at all before the small-holders

were liberated of their proprietary concerns

(niggling though they were)

and the good word spread:

the threshold of the interval between liberation

and freedom had, on tip-toe over ice,

been crossed.

This (indefinite) perspiring interval - the hard-work of whetting the blade,

of poising the sword - liberated first

the fallow earth. And next, till such a time as tendencies

were trusted, so much else was to be suppressed.

The birth of freedom was to be gratuitously midwifed,

and so they found externalized the very

prison of their marriage: the submission

of individual desire to the rigours of discipline.

He, of bookish anti-Semitism, took to wrestling

with a tumbler or two of whiskey, and a friend,

in a shed. She got on

with it, hoping not to have a child.

Life plus electricity, plus the banning of this

or that, trampled over dogged habit,

but failed to extinguish it too thoroughly.

Like the sea king, subject to barnacles and the

battering of the tide,

all the rape and boredom of daily life,

didn't go away, it just took on mutant forms.