The Interval

It’s only in the interval you appreciate the play,
Munching cheese and onion crisps and sipping Beaujolais.
With you, I’m deep in drama, like King Lear:
There’s an icy gale on bitten flesh. But the sky just seems so clear
With you, and there’s the sub-plot, where I laugh as though a child
Playing by some dark, Grimm forest wherein lies something wild:
That part of me that’s also part of you;
Some Dionysan Mystery Cult, initiates so few,
Which I looked at scientifically, made sense of like a don,
Evans-Pritchard in Sudan structuring what was going on,
But like flaking bark, his logic fell away,
When he saw “the light of witchcraft” and had nothing more to say.
With you, in that moment, having calmed in the foyer,
Munching cheese and onion crisps and sipping Beaujolais,
I saw and felt our light anew, that part of me that’s part of you,
And colours deepened, and blue was more than blue
And I felt myself drawn back into the play
Where only we know real depths and all the world’s our prey.