Peckish poems on Hello Poetry

Nigel Morgan Oct 2013

She said over the ether: ‘I’m eating a perfectly ripe fig. So nice, I’m going to have another’.

We’ve been here before he thought as he read her text. In a memory’s moment he was back at her dining room table with five figs in a small bowl. The table wore a blue cloth, and she a Scandinavian skirt with pockets. It was that time of year when the midday light can be so golden, so wonderful. He remembered her delight that he had ‘brought figs to her table’. He was so full to the brim with love for her on that autumn day that those figs had seemed so very right, more than appropriate; a perfect addition to their developing intimacy. She had not been wooed by figs before. He wasn’t sure she understood their significance, their ****** stance. She hadn’t read The White Goddess. When pressed to explain he was tempted to tell her exactly what he understood a fig might suggest between lovers, and lovers they certainly were. She had cried out under his touch, had opened her mouth, her beautiful eyes, had cried out like no woman he had even begun to know. She was so extraordinarily passionate as he touched her. She moved with him and their bodies would kiss and stroke as though unbidden, of their own volition, ungovernable even. So when he touched the closest fig in the blue bowl on the lunchtime table it was a little like being touched by her in the greatest intimacy. The skin of the fig has this rub, it feels like the ******* of his passion, that she had so generously touched, had stroked, had known, had brought between the valley of her dear ******* that now, these several years gone and past, he still wondered at, that such a curve and fall and sensation in the hand and fingers could remain so wondrous, so magically beautiful.

He had responded in a text by writing: you sensuous woman . . . And she in reply had said: ‘Just pecking’. Does one really peck at figs? Surely not, he thought. She wrote: I meant peckish! Stupid predictive text. And he said: Surely one doesn’t eat figs because one is peckish. That’s what digestive biscuits are for.

And so it went on a little, this conversation over the ether. But all the while he was back in that sunlit room quite alone with her, before he should have been alone with her and feeling such passion, such a passion that its imprint still remained on his consciousness. He wondered if she really understood about this passion of his. It was beyond any possible fig known to man or woman. They were never figgish, only once and she had said it was not for her, and he had understood, and loved her all the more for such frankness in the face of passion. He was still feeling his way, hardly knowing how to deal with such passionate closeness, such desire to be close. How he loved her, he thought this again and again, again and now. He seemed to hold a whole litany of love inside him that he longed to sing out to her.

He was so grateful that she had interrupted those afternoon labours at his desk with her teasing words, and wondered whether she really did eat that second fig.

— The End —