FIRST TIME
One suitcase - finite.  Her thin bed is strewn
with shorts, strap sandals, wrapped transparent soap
and lotions to transform her Monday skin.
Things, irreducible, to underpin
a fortnight somewhere else with packaged hope
of touching Dionysus and Neptune.

She needs another bag; then off she flies
burdened with too much forethought.  Wine and sea
are waiting, frothing, tumbling as her blood
speeds up, impelled by thoughts half-understood.
The hairy, restless gods reach out and she
quickens, unpacks herself, loosens her thighs.

Nothing could make her ready for the salt
of foreign air, her first deep, gasping breath:
rank with desire, like olives in the sun,
falling into strong waves that run and run
until she's finished and a sudden death
returns her to that thin bed - by default.

Electrical Impulses
    (in the heart, when irregular, are a sign of normality)

In bed, embedded, stethoscoped,
so one heart caught the other's race,
Out-rivalling your random pace,
I beating wildly, wildly hoped

that you, like me, could not return
to even flow, but now I learn

that hearts take chaos as their norm.
I was deceived by turbulence,
electrified by violence,
to find it signalled calm, not storm.



A Mathematician Makes Love

As she lies naked, stretching out her arms,
he estimates the risks, works out their sum.
But love, bright zero, adds on to her charms
tenfold from that one figure.  He'll become
an ordinary man, enslaved yet freed:
he cannot think whilst his heart throbs and beats.
From all that complex algebra of need,
will there be answers hidden in these sheets?
Oh yes!  The clarifying power of sex
shows him a truth: only the process counts.
He's found the value of mysterious 'x'
and why - in finite, dry-as-dust amounts:
    the proof in mathematics ends with this.
    She turns to him, divides him with a kiss.

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