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Helen Kitson

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Love letters

I was more willing than you were
to see our own fault lines,
the cracks which didn’t quite split,
which somehow held us together.

I found that cache of letters in a drawer
and wanted to rip them, and you, and her, to shreds -
but I came to love your weakness, this hold
I had over you - and I think you deserved it -

your affair - your guilty, sexy secret - and in bed
I made love to both of you, thought of her,
kissed her scent from your back,
kissed you where her mouth had been.

One day the letters disappeared - I found
their confetti in the bin - stank afterwards
of potato peelings, the debris of our meals -
wondered if you could smell what I’d done.

I stopped loving you - if she didn’t want you,
I could only see you as a discarded man-;
a man whose past rotted among peelings,
things scraped off plates, life’s rubbish.

 

Helena Kitson’s first full-length collection, Love Among the Guilty, was published by Bloodaxe in 1995.

Page(s) 9

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