YOU
Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head.
so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name,
like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables
like a charm, like a spell.
Falling in love
is glamorous hell: the crouched, parched heart
like a tiger, ready to kill; a flame’s fierce licks under the skin.
into my life, larger than life, you strolled in.
I hid in my ordinary days, in the long grass of routine,
in my camouflage rooms. You sprawled in my gaze,
staring back from anyone’s face, from the shape of a cloud,
from the pining, earth-struck moon which gapes at me
as I open the bedroom door. The curtains stir. There you are
on the bed, like gift, like a touchable dream.
If the ‘naked name of love’ speaks out of the raw acknowledgement that the ‘you’ has become the anchoring horizon of each day, then Duffy here articulates the emotional nettedness of attraction where one lover is hunted down by her own desire for the casual assuredness of the strolling, sprawling other. I enjoyed the sustained metaphor of the tiger self, unable to resist the persistent yet ironically elusive hunter, and the sudden relief of the ‘love’ found and discovered, ‘ a touchable dream.’
Bob Marley once memorably sang ‘ Is this love?’ and here Duffy manages to translate the tests of love’s reality and in this case its foreshadowing through her lexis of let down and dissembly. So despite , ‘the thought of you stayed too late’ and this love is ‘glamorous hell’ ….there is little of the everyday in this relationship, of the nitty gritty of attending to things and the recognition that in such things rests ( and nurtures) enduring love. How far has the ‘crouched and parched heart’ chosen a lover whose apppeal and seduction lies in their limbic , almost theatrical presence rather than in any passionate resourcefulness and dare I say it, rapture?