Henry Quince

Cuckold

--------You see him in dreams and waking;
You see them both, sitting up as you might have found them,
-----------With startled eyes,
-----Or else you conjure their lovemaking
Minutes before, the sheets rumpled and damp around them,
-----And he supping her wild cries.

--------It isn’t so much the lies,
Not the deceptions in words, for all of us lie on occasion.
-----------But now to find,
-----Too late, the lies of months in her eyes —
That intimacies you shared, from her were but simulation!
-----This, this is what you most mind.

--------And this will never be mended
Until you can somehow bury those months, from memory banish
-----------The sham caresses,
-----The counterfeit passion, the love pretended —
Shut out for ever the treacherous mouthed endearments, make vanish
-----All those suddenly bloodless kisses.

Anthropic Principle

Why am I who I am? What God-thrown dice
decreed that I, this “I”, should live life here,
in just this shell of flesh, this space-time slice?
What huge unlikelihood has put me where
I am? — this planet, era, parentage
and body, from the billion could-have-beens;
this self-lit corner of the cosmic stage
where no one knows who sets or moves the scenes.

Why are you you? What still remoter chance
appointed your own far-fetched dice-cast “I”
to such precarious coincidence
with mine? So many ways you could pass by,
yet here you are: you meet — and do not miss —
of all imaginable poems, this.

[ First published in Umbrella ]