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HAZLITT
TO TOMKINS
You
thought you knew her, ordinary as yourself,
and
well touched up by lodgers on the stairs,
or
so you said, and yet not quite a slut,
for
it was good for business. Articled
to
legal offices, all you professionals
knew
morals must be economical.
Why,
even her mother, so you heard,
lifted
her Sarah’s plackets for the tenantry
to
ease the rents in. And
someone, so you say,
had
heard the two talk dirty by their pots,
guessing
at sizes, and which gent wore straps.
A
lass house-soiled who never went too far,
who
liked you best. Item: she
married you,
to
you did she surrender, she liked to laugh.
I
quite misunderstood, or so you say.
My
love was comical. To me she
went
not
on the ground at all but on the air
and
had a smile I said could not be fathomed
because
of its unsullied mystery
which
had an air hieratical and still
when
I embraced her with a sister kiss
and
kept her pure in thought and spiritual.
The
smile I had of her no man alive
could
ever have again. Who was betrayed?
Alan
Marshfield
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