Cook-In Sauce Poem by Tony Jolley

The Old Beams
Was an ‘oldey-worldey’ pub
On the right-hand side of the Ringwood – Salisbury road,
Rather too rich for our combined, courting-couple resources:
The sort of place parents would prefer
To go of a Friday or Saturday evening
To wine and dine
And wind themselves down from the working week;
Gracefully leaving available in the process
Six sweet feet of green Draylon sofa
Or the significantly more explicit
Adult invitation
To that dark, horizontal heat
Beating black and deep below
The duck-down duvet
Spread
Wide and linen-white upon my very double bed
Offering infinite,
Intimate
Night-time opportunity
To explore and exhibit
Each other’s unseens and untoucheds
From a variety of interesting, only-imagined, angles
More advantageous
And far more adventurous
Than the average vertical would allow.

Sometimes it had all the Seventies sophistication
Of a Homepride White-Wine Cook-in Sauce,
Coupled with the soft, seductive shades and shadows
Of candlelight,
Romancing us along a teenage, hormonal highwire,
Teetering precariously but deliciously
Between
A very nearly chaste,
Hour-or-more-long, breathless embrace
And tearing off each other’s clothes
As frantic to feel as to be felt
Barely before parents’ backs were turned
And the sound of their car slid,
All too slowly out of earshot….
…Still that stirs in me
Far more than mere memory.

Yes, the Old Beams, (‘though of course it never knew it)
Provided much-needed possibilities
To our youthful means and seriously playful motives.

Now, a generation on,
We live, love and lust
Under the ‘seen it all before’ benevolence
Of far older beams
Which frame and brace our French farmhouse
After a fashion with which
Shakespeare would have been eminently familiar;
Spanning the centuries
With that same, timeless ease
Which carries his plots and sonnets
Safe and sound into our present day reality.


These older beams
Present even greater potential
For us to pursue our pleasure,
Vaulting and thrusting at obscene angles
Above our heads,
Over our bed:
Mortise and Tenon couplings and socketings;
Ten-inch, heart of Oak dowling pins,
Thicker than my thumb:
Males hammered hard home
Into their accommodating, made-to-measure,
Female mate-holes,
Forcing and fixing each hip joint
In the perfect position
To spread the load
Along the length of these splayed limbs
And bear its weight,
Compliant,
Without complaint.