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Frances Wilson

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School Dance

My first dance dress
was midnight-blue taffeta,
but too big for me.

Its milky sheen cool-fingered
as if by accident my body
moving separately inside it.

Two days later, his letter
on the shelf in the alcove
off the hail where we’d danced.

News of it reached me,
the postmark spotted
and passed on, long before

I’d not recognised my name
in his writing. It beat
a distinction or an interview

for Oxford. But he slipped up
the next Saturday, smouldering
through the Main Gates

with a selection
of the First Eleven, come
to take me for a ride.

It wasn’t the dress, the dance,
not even the letter, let alone
‘Love, Gareth’ that I wanted -
it was only the envelope
in my left-breast blazer
pocket, its stripe of white

immeasurably different
from the one I’d always had
for Good Deportment.

 

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