For Helen, stanzas 1 and 2

Three lifetimes now have passed since we first met,
or maybe four - I have a photograph
of your engagement party, the regret
not yet shown in your eyes. We had a laugh
when we were very young. A furtive snog
at summer Shakespeare in Clare gardens and,
late night, in Kings - the wet lawn was a bog,
the mud and grass-stained shirt I washed by hand.
Was it so very wrong of us to flirt
and ricochet as balls in cellar pool?
Others' collisions did us far more hurt
than ours did them. I was played for a fool
by my first love, and yours was not to be -
surviving, I moved on to Eltisley.

Another time, and on a single bed
you helped me lose a burden of self-doubts,
an empty prize, as stale as week-old bread
but fun to eat, to learn some ins and outs
with you - patient (impatient with the foil
and my incompetence with what it held),
giving (eager to take, to slip like oil),
open to me, to rise, to fall, to meld.
It was a stolen moment, of a few
such clinches, as we each went our own way
in life and love. I found the woman who
completed me, I thought, though she might say
I held her back, in life if not in bed.
And you decamped to Germany, and wed.

Stanzas 3 and 4 to follow