End of the Pier Show

It was — what? — the triumph of hope
over experience. But what triumph
(and what hope)? The continued display
of a kind of unreasonable fortitude,

the man — Beowulf — stooping
to pick his severed head off the sawdust,
and doing it again and again. And she,
the woman, sold, to her mind, on love

as a kind of motor syrup — a green linctus —
that was slowly replacing her blood.
Perhaps lycanthropy. A pessimistic sublime.
They had made their bed and they

were jolly well going to lie in it.
The woman's persistent complaint
that it wasn't a life, the man shrugging,
going away, battening down,

daring her to do worse, if not her worst.
Siege conditions. And she bringing out
in him strange abysms of new behaviour.
Everything went so peculiarly,

spectacularly skewed. They were fascinated
by what they seemed to have contained.
Unspoolings of truths. Such dire sayings
of hers. Such vehemence out of his mouth.

Just as well really his doggish gloom
met his prickliness halfway.
Attritional chafe, chafe, bridle and chafe,
and, periodically a grin and tears.

Her good will expressed itself
in a strange persistence of affection
that he not unreasonably supposed
would last forever.

(It wasn't to do with him, was it?)
When it stopped, he didn't believe it.
He didn't know what to do.
He went hunting around for the trip switch

that had made this darkness, this withdrawal.
(Alas, he was never much of an electrician.)
What happened to their lovely
puppet theatre, their grand knockabout?