When the fragile music dies
you put away your voice,
and with the passion
          of Campion’s songs
still running in our veins
there is another duet,
and so intense its harmony
that only the need for food
brings it to a ritardando.
 
In the dark kitchen
I cut the crusts from brown bread,
making sandwiches, cream-cheesed,
the sliced cucumus sativus
flecked with mint and cress,
and placed on blue plates,
surrounded by olives, grapes
- an apricot apiece.
 
Then for the coda:
(in the bluest of blue bowls)
musk strawberries lounging
on a bed of rubus idaeus.
 
We troop upstairs
with our matching plates,
and I lay the Welsh-woolled rug
on the studio floor.
We place beside them
heavy glasses of mint and honeyed tea,
and eat immediately, hungrily.
 
Later, still aflame
from such music and its crystalled verse,
we lie amidst the studio tea
making sure we are not fiction, but wholly real.
You say, ‘Perhaps raspberry is the new fig’.
and place this fruit between my lips.