Her flat is on the fourteenth floor.
String handles make his fingers burn.
Both lifts are out again. Sod’s law.
He stops half way. A giddy turn.
More staggered flights. Encaustic tiles.
Glass cladding visible for miles.
She’s in of course. Unsnibs the Yale,
shrinks back into her chilly hall
then, shushing him, don’t tell a soul,
grows arch, conspiratorial,
relishing, a smoker’s whisper,
goings on in Seven Sisters.
O, she could tell a tale or two
up here, her head stuck in the clouds,
of how she danced with dead men who
on blacked out nights knocked her around,
sometimes for love and once to claim
a bracelet given in love’s name.
He was a pretty, coltish boy
this son who bald, retired, harassed,
uncorks with wine, in corduroy,
a bouquet thrown up from her past
and she, still skittish, flown again
on Cheval Blanc down Blackhorse Lane.
