1
At one slight tug the loosened belt
Undoes its bow and now the slack
And lapsing folds of fabric melt
Across her shoulderblades and back,

Over her buttocks, down her thighs,
Like lotion, lucent, smooth and cool,
Until about her feet it lies
In a still rippling gathered pool,

From which she steps to his embrace –
That naked garment to redress
Her nakedness – where face to face
They form two parts of one caress.

As when in scientific probes
The brain is wired and stimuli
Reveal its efflorescent lobes
To burst in colours, flare and die,

So where their bodies touch, the pressure
Of limb on limb, the lingering stroke
Of fingertips, the inward pleasure
Held beyond breathing, all provoke

Pictures that flourish in the mind,
So intimate and so intense
That to each other they seem blind.
They watch them with another sense

While through the images they gasp
Towards each other where they lie
Locked in an ever tighter clasp,
Lest they themselves should flare and die.

2
The casual inspector
Might look on them as frauds,
A cold waxwork attraction
Shown at Madame Tussaud’s.
A word from the director,
Though, summons them to action.

Under the lights’ enormous
And vitalising charge,
The camera-worked emotions
In which they loom so large,
Our two aroused performers
Rise to their moist devotions.

Limbs separate and tangle,
Open and close: how much
The lens’s lurid hocus
Brings near enough to touch.
There’s no forbidden angle,
No unimagined focus.

And should we glimpse their faces
Like any other part,
The view’s hardly invasive
Of either mind or heart;
The pleasure-blind grimaces
They play are unpersuasive,

But simply moves obeying
A script, the formula
Their tireless bodies follow
Like two automata
Incessantly portraying
Senses of which they’re hollow.

Those eyes grant no disclosure
Of any scene within,
Only an illustrated
Extension of the skin,
A quite selfless exposure
That says less than is stated.

Our revels now are ended.
They fall back side by side –
Like Frankenstein’s numb creature
Laid out by his numb bride
Before the charge intended
To quicken limb and feature.

3
The doors are locked, the curtains drawn.
Loosed by enclosure they begin
Dismantling the long discipline
That holds them between dawn and dawn.

The sheets that mantle the embowment
Made by their bodies crease and move
About them as they strive to prove
Time prisoner to one slow moment.

And as in the advertisement
A woman wading through the cool,
Thigh-pleated waters of a pool
Tugs at it with an indolent

And trailing hand and peels away
The surface like a silken shawl,
So in their coupling as they sprawl
And ruck the bedclothes in their play,
More than the bedclothes are pulled free.
The carpets are dragged up and wound
About them, the four walls around
The bed surrender pliantly

In rumpled folds, the windows dyed
With green leaf-netted light collapse
And join the fabric which enwraps
Their blind arrival. But outside

A bus brakes. In the market, crowds
Are haggling. Little boys compete
While sparrows peck the windy street.
The sky makes history in the clouds.

---

STEPHEN EDGAR lives in Hobart. He is the author of five volumes of poetry, the most recent of them being Lost in the Foreground (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2003).