Summit of Beauty and Love

 

Summit of Beauty and Love

 

A desert day fit for hot baking,

your armpits damp, your throat aching

conjure cracked roadside eggs sizzling

and sweet-filled taco syrup spilling -

just oozing into parched cracks.

You’d watched her morning struggle -

arm behind, her fingers juggling

as she's hooking up her cupcakes,

and now you sit outside and wait,

the Pajero’s air-con grappling manfully

with an Arabian summer’s heat.

Her friend comes from dark interiors

of some low-rent abode

bucking bales as she negotiates the road -

surely those buttons will never hold,

or so your inner bad boy hopes.

Later at IKEA, she’s picked sausages

a hearty helping, a wanton portion,

her teeth, her lips perform contortions

and how you loved that word –

tittered at it, when you were young

and growing up, it was among

those you banked for sleepless nights.

Later, among the clocks and lights,

her bag bulging with trivial picks –

she speaks Filipino and licks

the cone as whippy ice cream drips

from wafers onto fingers.

What you’re told later long lingers

into your afternoon siesta’s dreams –

her French boyfriend, of vast appetites

vacationed and had taken flights

of fancy with some other squeeze,

sending evidence in the post –

it must have been a hollow boast

after she’d packed him. Such a shame

but, even so, you feel it just the same,

swimming up the torpor of your brain

and Venus was her name.