Daydreaming on Guildford High Street

Cherry

By bhi

Thu, 15 Jul 2021
  • 330 reads
2 comments
 

Stepping down the steepling cobbled High Street,

Past the detritus of the pandemic,

Shop closures universal, not endemic,

On the way to Luca’s for a lunch treat,

I’m ensnared by Massimo’s window sign;

“Final reductions! 80% off!”

Unable to resist such a bargain

(and loving all things Spanish, women and wine)

I enter, browse. There’s a discrete cough.

I turn, think I’m back in Eden’s garden.

 

Sun singing in her freckled eyes she smiles,

And I’m sold on the cotton shirts I’ve eyed

and her, transported back to the beginning

from where I fast forward to the ending,

her lips already on mine, hot sweat sweet

softly pushed into my mouth, tongue probing

against mine, body tender, stomach taut;

’96, it was, on the Ibizan beach

where we first met - I selling ice-cream cones,

she a maths post grad island hopping -

Stopped: explored each other’s peninsulas

Separated from the world,

Knowing only the other’s will,

The wild green bay of the flesh,

Invisible moons visible only to the other,

Lust rapidly changing into love,

And our lives adjusting to its nuances….

 

“Sir? Do you need any help in choosing?”

I shake off the visions, watch them dissolve,

Mumble, “Estoy mirando,” my heart guiding

Me back into the orbit of the heart waiting.

Certificate 15
Poem
Passion

Comments

Submitted by Di_Hard on

Your poem brought back memories as I grew up a few miles from Guildford :0) Haven't been there for a very long time, though, don't remember either place you mention, was more C&A and Our Price, which disappeared in an earlier wave of closures. So that added another layer for me. How often I walked up and down the cobbled hill from and to the bus station!

There is something about clothes shopping, as if you pick up the possibility of another way  of life, for a second, with each touch of fabric, as if it were a door? Your poem seems like time travel, though, taking you to a door that leads somewhere wonderful, but you have already gone through, are already far into the rich land inside

 

Submitted by bhi on

Di, thank you for your comments. The High Street is a beautiful place; I admire the architecture of the buildings, the blend of old and new, the contrast and conflict of the new trying to blend with and bend the old. 

Your comment about clothes' shopping is spot on; it is the sense of new possibilities, taking on a new skin, of transformation. And in terms of "a door" I find that most things , for me, trigger memories and a tracing back into the past, reliving moments, and almost akin, as you say to "time travel". The past adds richness to our present and it lays a foundation for the future. We are the sum of all three times.