Brief Encounter
The first night you sat nursing
a sick kitten on my balcony.
The second, you swam naked
off the beach at Montazah.
I marvelled at the ballerina's
vertebrae of broken moons
that rippled in your wake.
The third, to the accompaniment
of Madame Butterfly, sweat
rained from your body as you
straddled me and buckled
like a bird hit by a train.
The fourth, I was upended
by a barrow filled with melons.
You bathed my wounds with
iodine and diplomatic silence
and asked me for a souvenir.
I gave you my torn shirt.
Your head (a rose too heavy
for its stem) upon my shoulder,
I walked you to the station,
whispered I would write. You
frowned and muttered angrily
about "these fucking people
staring". Thinking Brief Encounter,
I waited for a brave-faced wave
but somewhere on the way
from carriage door to first-class
window seat you vanished.
I watched the space you should
have filled, been waving from,
head slowly through a haze
of soot and apricot for Cairo.
Walking home, I stopped
to watch two zebra-sleeved
policemen lift the topknot
of a date palm from the middle
of the road. I thought you
would be easy to forget until
I reached my door and heard
the mewing of a cat: the kitten,
in another life, that you had
nursed to health. I took it
to my balcony, sat it on my lap
and let it silence donkeys,
mosques and music with its purrs.
Chris Rice was a founder member of a London poetry group, The Pembridge Poets, in the mid-1970s with Robert Greacen, Matthew Sweeney and Tim Dooley. In 2011, he started to write poetry again after a twenty-year silence. Since then, his work has been placed or short/longlisted in a number of competitions and has been published widely in magazines and anthologies, including Acumen, The London Magazine, Magma, The Poetry Review, Poetry Salzburg Review and One Hand Clapping. Extracts from a literary memoir (Diary of a Pembridge Poet) can be found online at The London Magazine (October 2019; March 2020; June 2022). A collection of early poems, Call of Nature (Lapwing Publications), appeared in 2013. Both Brief Encounter and Small Blue Thing were first published ten years ago in Envoi (July 2013).