We fell in love when we were eight,
our child was born when we were nine:
a tiny thing with gnarled black teeth,
a rough grey beard and rosy cheeks.

It grew up to keep a hive of imps,
behind the shack where it lived alone;
it said their honey made for healthy skin
and bottled it in jars from bins,
and stacked it up in racks of gold.

Then it heard about the gorgons
who, shunned and ugly, cry for love
with every mouth of their writhing heads
and never know its gentle touch,
as they ever-spin in loneliness.

And every night it combed its beard
and carefully washed its lovely skin
and brushed its tar-black teeth, and felt
ashamed to know such suffering
and turn away like any coward,
while it piled up facial honey.

One market day it sold it all
and even tried to sell the imps.
It bought a rose in a purple pot,
a box of chocolates called Romance
and a wedding ring of real gold,
then headed for the station.

We used to laugh that if the gorgon
ever got to see it coming,
with its hopeless smile, its rose bush and its chocs,
she’d hide until it went away.
We’d imagine it asking for directions
and shake our heads in mock despair.

But that was many years ago
and now a silence stands here all the time,
like something died and the fault was ours,
and every day we have to pass
that awful shack and the burned-out hive.

What use is a stinking gorgon anyway?
It is us our baby loves, not some thing.
Please tell us, do you have some news?
We’re frightened and we want it home;
but only if it comes alone.

The wild-wood seemed empty when we were young,
a doorstep Eden to my friend and me,
as we cycled dusty paths and rabbit tracks

through halls of mottled gold and whispering green.
Our stones torpedoed the old mill pond, where dragonflies
were mother-ships to wasps and water-boatmen.

Or we'd creep through ruined houses thick with black webs:
the warm remains of recent fires in the hearths,
bottles strewn by soiled blankets on the floor.

While the woods conjured fungus or primrose,
ghosts arrived in the sudden silences of birds
and in the goose-flesh touch of unseen eyes

that watched from mote-filled prisons of the sun.
But one afternoon, as teatime neared
and we pushed our bikes homeward up a hill,

a man stepped out of the trees and said:
I'll let you into the greatest secret: and out sprang
a thing with a neck like a forearm,

ghost-white from having been kept in the dark,
as he zipped apart his groin's black fruit.
Then he walked along beside us murmuring

how he'd seen us breaking windows with stones
and holding hands, but would never tell.
And all the while that living length nodded closer

and its hooded eye regarded us:
You can touch it if you want.
Then he stood and watched us walk away,

and gravely Peter turned to me and said:
I don't want to play here any more,
and I agreed; there were other places we could go.

But later I returned,
cycling urgently for miles down the summer dusk,
to be folded into that astounding dark.