Afternoons in winter
I sit in Robert Roberts Café
Watching men and women,
Especially women.
I am crazy about women.

Just because I am a man without a woman
Does not mean that I have no interest in women.
In fact I am preoccupied with fundamentally nothing else.
I read all of Nietzsche when I was seventeen.
Then it was time to grow up.

Would you please hose some of your hot liquid into me?
Mother of five to boy at coffee dispenser.
She must be forty at least but as she sips her grounds
- Her Costa Rican grounds -
As she slowly smacks her lips
Trickling her tonguetip along her liprim
She is a girl not yet nineteen
Haughty as an Englishwoman in Shanghai.
She is wearing a red cloche hat, grey wool overcoat,
Black low high-heel shoes.

I see in today's newspaper a black-and-white photograph
Of a woman in a black mini-skirt at the opening
Of the Séan McSweeney Retrospective last night
(There is a man who can paint - not many can
Since the Great Yeat died in 1957).

But much as that photo causes a stir in me
- An abstract stir in me -
It is as nothing compared to that glimpse of ankle
- Sheer ankle -
Of the mother of five in the red cloche bat
- Would you please hose some of your hot liquid into me?

Time to go - home. I dally to loiter
In the doorway of the café sernaphoring to myself
In the shopwindow opposite, my bowler hat,
My frock coat, my gleaming galoshes.
A flower girl with a single red rose in her hands
Is passing the time of day with the mother of five
Not making any particular pitch to sell.

Timorousness entices me to my right
But I know, Jack, I know I should step briskly to my left,
Proffer the single red rose to the mother of five,
Nail my colours to the mast.
Will I or won't I?
And give all my loose change to the flower girl -
All my loose change?