REBELLION OF A HALF-BAKED HAMLET

When I was fifteen or so my mother took me to Etretat.

For a week we clip-clopped down to la plage

each day after the continental orgy

of croissants and café au lait

to barbecue ourselves in systematic rotations

around,

around,

around,

broiled in the lea of the promenade’s embankment –

I clockwise,

my mother

anticlockwise.

Testosterone and gonadotrophins

simmered, bubbled and boiled

in the Norman sun.

I lay prostrate beside the almost-Rubens flesh

of my dam and spied between close lids

a fourteen-year-old whose breasts

barely insinuated themselves under discreet cotton

and whose nose and lips

brought on embarrassing engorgement

which I endeavoured half-heartedly to hide.

Each day the fourteen-year-old was there

on her striped towel with her friends, and, as I dipped

into Les Pensées de Pascal in the shadow of my head,

my own thoughts were less on Blaise’s thinking reed

than on her luminous eyes

and the abruptness of her nose.

I soon realised it was my mother

who’d declared impediments against my love:

without the ban of her presence

(I told myself)

I would put down Pascal and say,

‘Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?’

in shocking Anglo-French.

Back at the hotel one afternoon

I recall my first declaration of hate.

I whipped my mother with my words,

haunted by an oval metaphoric face

in the lea of the promenade’s embankment, Etretat.