I

Not everyone sees it, but I glimpsed the man

inside our terrier. We’d walked up the lane,

he stood back, a second, to let me in

through the gate, so courtly that, on my inner eye,

I saw him for the first time clearly

not a dog but a dish dressed in soft chamois,

tall like a prince, with thigh-length boots.

I said I would marry him. Sepia street lights

were our veil as, with love, I opened the locks

to our royal dwelling. Then, back on all fours,

he was wagging his tail by the kitchen door.

Beauty hides in the beast. This is the law.

II   The gods still walk around South Wales

Caught in a traffic jam outside the Monico

cinema, a girl called idly on Apollo,

not meaning it. A stranger steps in. ‘We’ll go

up to the Beacons,’ he said. ‘I am

the answer to your prayers, a dangerous man,

not deus ex machina but lunatic in van.’

So she drove, directed by his Stanley knife,

fearing now for her hairdresser life

on B roads, till he’d ravished her enough

in lay-bys, near beauty-spot streams

to satisfy her kidnap dreams.

They say she made it all up. But how come

her joy, despite all the names she was called

by hacks and her neighbours? How come she recalled

such transport of love, a shower of gold?

III   View from an ocean-going liner