Of the several answers to darkness, better than sleep
and lovelier is the lighting of lanterns in gardens,
the claustrophiliac revelation of closeness, light
laden with intimate comfort: important harmony!
Two girls in white
inhabit this acquiescent tenderness, Alices
cool in Marian shifts, innocents lavender-scented
and cotton-stockinged -- you think of Betjeman's bicycle-
riding Oxford girls, the avuncular arousal these
slim-limbed little
women trigger. What kind of Eden is this, anyway,
where only emblematic flowers grow? -- carnations for the
experience of blood, lilies for virginity, and
roses modest and flushed (Lolitadom of girlhood!) like
laundered bloodstained
linen. They are not girls but ideas of girls, and in
the otherworld of intimate green already their thoughts
are of leaving their paradise, as women in Watteau
dream of flying: see, it is in their serious faces
taking the glow.
Michael Hulse
